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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

That's a good way to phrase it, and something I agree with. I'd heard the phrase "epistemological modesty" a while back, and it goes nicely with this - I think a great deal of harm is done in this world by people looking at other people suffering and either convincing themselves or being convinced that there's a greater systemic reason why those people need to suffer. Epistemological modesty suggests whatever grand designs we're contemplating are likely wrong, moral incompletionism suggests they can never be fully right, and both together suggest it's immoral to ignore suffering today because of some imagined future for some other people.

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> moral incompletionism suggests they can never be fully right

Yes. My conclusions are twofold.

1. Attempting to create a complete and consistent moral framework is a fools errand. There will always be either moral gaps (cases that are outside the moral framework's ability to judge), or moral inconsistencies (cases where we have two incompatible moral conclusions).

2. Attempting to render a moral framework invalid by either pointing out its incompleteness or its inconsistency is not meaningful - since all moral frameworks are susceptible to one or both of these flaws. Therefore our justification for deciding the virtues of a moral framework cannot be that it is consistent nor complete - rather it has to be something else entirely.

We have to accept that there are unknowable or conflicting moral facts and each of these results in moral ambiguity either by absence or excess. This is independent of any particular moral framework (Yes even yours dear reader).

> I think a great deal of harm is done in this world by people looking at other people suffering and either convincing themselves or being convinced that there's a greater systemic reason why those people need to suffer.

Is that the "just world hypothesis" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy ?

I’d argue most attempts aren’t actually attempts to do good — they’re justifications for doing wrong.

Eg, DIE as a justification for systemic antisemitism in employment and education.

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