Hacker News Reader

Comment by zenogais | Hacker News Reader

You start by assuming you know what morality is and moral is and then launch into an examination of profitable designs that are immoral under your system. This discourse would be far more interesting if you abandoned your preconceptions and ask "What is morality?", "Does morality deeply influence design? how?", "What morality influences good, timeless design?", "Is there some morality at which all (good|bad) design aims?" - If you really want to start a moral design discourse you should start from square one.

View on HN

I say that being a meth dealer is immoral, and your response is that I can't make such a statement without first dispensing a treatise on morality?

You should absolutely be able to give real, concrete reasons why being a meth dealer is harmful to people. Otherwise anyone can (and does) spew out things they think are immoral. In the case of meth, it's easy. With Farmville it's a bit more complicated.

If you play it, and get sucked in, or see your friends sucked in, or even worse, have children and see them sucked in... No, it's not complicated at all.

I've had friends who've gone the cocaine death spiral. One lived a life of lies. [An HN relevant anecdote: He was responsible for our source control, wasn't taking backups or checking disk space monitors. Full disk, corruption, 85 devs losing a week manually rebuilding central source from local copies (before Git). He was fired]

I've seen people sucked into tv dramas, tv dramas are evil.

I've seen people sucked into WoW, WoW is evil.

I've seen people sucked into Final Fantasy, heck... every RPG is probably evil.

Actually, it seems like any form of entertainment can be rather addictive, the world would be better if that whole industry went away.

You're right, this is easy.

Is the immorality of being a meth or crack dealer not easy for you to recognize? If not, there's no point in continuing to debate.

If it is AND if you actually played a game like FarmVille and got addicted despite being very intelligent, despite being aware of how inane the "game" is and how it cynically taps into some primitive part of your brain, you'd realize that your examples are to FarmVille what selling donuts are to dealing crack/meth/heroin.

An extremely important distinction that @saraid216 and perhaps you may have failed to make: The claim is not that X itself is immoral or using/playing X is immoral, but that the intentions and methods of the dealers/creators of X are.

Scads have been written on the problems around morality so it is certainly not an over and done with "couldn't be more obvious" issue. The problem is we deem it one of these issues with no further debate - it's a nearly universal modern prejudice to which most of us are blind. There is tons of literature dealing with questions like: Have there been different moralities throughout history? (Hint: There have. In reading Aristotle we see that lying was considering virtuous and pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind.) Is thinking for humans really otherwise than an instinctual act? If not then what does that say for personal responsibility? Is there perhaps something valuable to sustaining life in lying, selfishness, self-deception, etc? Of course you probably deem all of these easily answerable questions, but I assure you a little digging below the surface and they are remarkably difficult and fascinating questions most of which still do not have answers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com