Hacker News Reader

Comment by rawgabbit | Hacker News Reader

> Might be useful to ask a different question: What makes people happy?

This is the age old question. For me at least, the quest for meaning lead me to reason. Reason and logic, then led me to two choices. First is there is no meaning, no purpose, and life is what you make or not make of it; this is more commonly known as nihilism. The second choice is a literal leap of faith; this argues that humans are incapable of understanding of the purpose of life and we need to have faith in the existence of a benevolent God. The leap of faith ultimately leads me back to the question of what is God? Catholic tradition defines God as the source of caritas also known as agape.

View on HN

It might be the case that the nuance is insufficient (false dichotomy).

Suppose someone asks the [emotionally loaded] question:

"Is abortion wrong?"

Technically this is a yes or no question; a binary.

One can quite easily answer that it depends, and then all the nuances can try to be enumerated in more detail. The fact is that the information presented was not actually nuanced enough to answer yes or no despite being worded as such.

You performed some similar gymnastics here. You assume it must be the case that it is one or the other when it may not be. Maybe meaning is local. Maybe it is real but subjective. Maybe it isn't a meaningful term (lol). Maybe it contains an intrinsic paradox!

A perhaps alternative question might be: "What is it that wishes to know the answer to that question?"

Figuring that out might be a necessary prerequisite.

> "Is abortion wrong?"

It is morally wrong as you are destroying life. If you widen the frame, the question is who should be making this choice. I would argue the mother should make this choice even if it is morally wrong. It is morally wrong because I took a leap of faith that human life from birth to conception is precious.

Reason and logic lead you to only two choices, where one choice immediately begs you to abandon reason and logic and just believe what feels right? I think reason and logic can take you further than that. We can explore a spectrum of ideas without committing immediately.

The point is that you actually cannot explore a spectrum of ideas without committing immediately because you are forced to live and living forces you to commit and make moral decisions every day.

I subscribe to the notion that morals are emotion based propositions and thus aren't quite as grounded in pure logic. As in there is not an objective morality, just things we know to be good and bad that are abstracted away from direct experience. Nothing wrong with that, but as feeling beings, we don't need to hugely ponder the vast spectrum of ideas to determine within ourselves what is "good" and what is "bad". Always worth thinking about second and third and x order effects of a certain moral judgement, and this is where logic comes in to the picture, but definitely trust your intuition in the meantime and don't put yourself into a box. You're welcome to not commit to a concrete worldview until you're comfortable, while still being a decent person.

These problems arise when you ruminate instead of living.

>First is there is no meaning, no purpose, and life is what you make or not make of it; this is more commonly known as nihilism.

You say it as if it's something bad. It's not unprecedented: inquisitors believed spinning Earth was bad, but now it somehow isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com