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Comment by fab13n | Hacker News Reader

You can be amoral, by not basing your actions on moral considerations. That's what's expected of judges, cops etc.: they (ought to only) consider whether you broke the law, not whether you're a good person.

Reddit banned jailbait because it was bound to host a lot of illegal material, not because it was disgusting.

> You don't get to provide material support for a site and at the same time say "we're not responsible for it".

I understand their position as "we materially support everything that interest some people and doesn't break the law, irrespective of our personal opinion about it". It means sometimes supporting stuff they might sometimes find personally appalling, just as a lawyer sometimes has to try and get out of jail a person he personally despises.

Besides, supporting freedom of speech forces to support questionable expressions: speeches which don't offend anyone don't need to be protected.

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> I understand their position as "we materially support everything that interest some people and doesn't break the law, irrespective of our personal opinion about it"

That is a morality! That's a moral decision.

What I'm disagreeing with is the notion you proposed that reddit could be "amoral". Every decision you make has a moral component; keeping /r/creepshots alive is one of them.

> That is a morality! That's a moral decision.

I understand it to be more of an economic/legal decision, not moral. Laws are crafted after morals, but following the law does not make you morally sound. It only allows you to maintain your freedom by avoiding prosecution.

> Every decision you make has a moral component;

What we're discussing here is the moral motivation (or lack of it) of Reddit. Any moral implications it has for the population are irrelevant.

Not every decision has a moral component. Deciding whether to have cucumbers in my salad today at lunch does not have a moral components (its mostly about how fresh they look that day.)

Here, I see how you could say they made a moral decision. But in this case they made one moral decision of essentially "We allow all legal speech here". After they made that call, there is no further moral decision in keeping any particular, (legal) thread alive.

Had they decided "We will exercise some editorial discretion beyond just what is needed to comply with the law" then every single thread becomes a moral decision.

If you want to be precise, reddit has made the single moral decision that they will permit (legal) free-speech and beyond that point they have chosen to be amoral.

> Not every decision has a moral component

Fair, I overreached there.

> reddit has made the single moral decision that they will permit (legal) free-speech

except for doxing, of course. Except for hate speech. Except for spam. Except for gawker (whoops, no that was by accident). Except for...

> reddit has made the single moral decision that they will permit (legal) free-speech and beyond that point they have chosen to be amoral

1) As I stated above, that falls apart when you look at it closely. Reddit indeed tries to minimally muck around with content, but it certainly does do so.

2) You can't substitute legality for morality and call it amorality; all you can do is align your morality with the law if you choose to do so.

Imagine an alternate universe where the internet existed during Jim Crow, and Georgia law required it to have black and white websites. According to the "law supersedes morality" theory, they could morally segregate white and black users in Georgia.

Obviously that's a ludicrous scenario for many reasons, but I think Jim Crow laws are an excellent illustration of the divergence of morality and legality. Choosing to follow the law is a moral decision, and you can't wish that away.

I agree with your basic point, but for clarity we as a society hand a fair bit of discretion to cops and even more to prosecutors and judges. In at least some instances we want them to make moral judgements, so long as thos moral judgements are within and guided by the law.

This is especially true in sentencing. For a minor traffic violation, a cop has discretion to say "You were speeding, but you have a totally clean record and it wasn't much, this time you get a warning." Most people want them to be able to do that and it is a mostly moral judgement. A prosecutor can say, "You met all the technical definitions of the crime, but you had extenuating circumstances. I decline to prosecute." Sometimes that is based on either law (the extenuating circumstance, like self defense, is explicitly recognized), or the evidence (its a close call whether they could win and they have "bigger fish to fry"), but sometimes its a straight moral call. Often we want them to be able to make that moral call.

With judges it depends on the jurisdiction, but they often have enormous discretion once it comes to sentencing. In many jurisdictions, the legislature hands out some guidelines, but just guidelines. The same crime might get many years in prison or probation, depending on the judge's moral decision about whether that instance of the crime was heinous or more excusable and whether the judge thinks that person is a career criminal or someone who gave into temptation once.

They must follow the law, but within the law we as a society explicitly hand out a lot of discretion at different points and we expect part of that discretion to be used to make moral calls within the framework of the law.

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