Comment by jychang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jychang | Hacker News Reader

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"there isn't any useful knowledge" "Morality is redundant."

I strongly dispute this statement, and honestly find it baffling that you would claim as such.

The fact that you will be punished for murdering babies is BECAUSE it is morally bad, not the other way around! We didn't write down the laws/punishment for fun, we wrote the laws to match our moral systems! Or do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.

Your argument has the same structure as saying: "We don't need germ theory. The fact that washing your hands prevents disease is just one reason why you should wash your hands. People socially also find dirty hands disgusting, and avoid you as social punishment. Any reason you come up with for hand-washing works without a germ theory framing."

But germ theory is precisely why hand-washing prevents disease and why we evolved disgust responses to filth. Calling it "redundant" because we can list its downstream effects without naming it doesn't make the underlying framework unnecessary. It just means you're describing consequences while ignoring their cause. You can't explain why those consequences hold together coherently without it; the justified true belief comes from germ theory! (And don't try to gettier problem me on the concept of knowledge, this applies even if you don't use JTB to define knowledge.)

I'm not interested in wading into the wider discussion, but I do want to bring up one particular point, which is where you said

> do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.

This is absolutely something we do: our purely technical, legal terms often feed back into our moral frameworks. Laws are even created to specifically be used to change peoples' perceptions of morality.

An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.

The word itself is even treated as a form of punishment; a label attached to someone permanently, that colors how (almost) every person who interacts with them (who's aware of it) will perceive them, morally.

Another example is rhetoric along the lines of "If they had complied, they wouldn't have been hurt", which is explicitly the use of a punishment (being hurt) to create an judgement/perception of immorality on the part of the person injured (i.e. that they must have been non-compliant (immoral), otherwise they would not have been being punished (hurt)). The fact they were being punished, means they were immoral.

Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.

Point being, our laws and punishments absolutely create feedback loops into our moral frameworks, precisely because we assume laws and punishments to be just.

> An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.

The US is an outlier here; the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours has been abolished in most other common law jurisdictions.

Often it is replaced by a similar distinction, such as indictable versus summary offences-but even if conceptually similar to the felony-misdemeanour distinction, it hasn’t entered the popular consciousness.

As to your point about law influencing culture-is that really an example of this, or actually the reverse? Why does the US largely retain this historical legal distinction when most comparable international jurisdictions have abolished it? Maybe, the US resists that reform because this distinction has acquired a cultural significance which it never had elsewhere, or at least never to the same degree.

> Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.

On the immigration issue: Many Americans seem to view immigration enforcement as somehow morally problematic in itself; an attitude much less common in many other Western countries (including many popularly conceived as less “right wing”). Again, I think your point looks less clear if you approach it from a more global perspective

> “Any reason you come up with for hand-washing works without a germ theory framing”.

This is factually correct though. However, we have other reasons for positing germ theory. Aside from the fact that it provides a mechanism of action for hand-washing, we have significant evidence that germs do exist and that they do cause disease. However, this doesn’t apply to any moral theory. While germ theory provides us with additional information about why washing hands is good, moral theory fails to provide any kind of e.g. mechanism of action or other knowledge that we wouldn't be able to derive about the statement “hunting babies for sport is bad” without it.

> The fact that you will be punished for murdering babies is BECAUSE it is morally bad, not the other way around! We didn't write down the laws for fun, we wrote the laws to match our moral systems! Or do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.

You will be punished for murdering babies because it is illegal. That’s just an objective fact about the society that we live in. However, if we are out of reach of the law for whatever reason, people might try to punish us for hunting babies because they were culturally brought up to experience a strong disgust reaction to this activity, as well as because murdering babies marks us as a potentially dangerous individual (in several ways: murdering babies is bad enough, but we are also presumably going against social norms and expectations).

Notably, there were many times in history when baby murder was completely socially acceptable. Child sacrifice is the single most widespread form of human sacrifice in history, and archaeological evidence for it can be found all over the globe. Some scholars interpret some of these instances as simple burials, but there are many cases where sacrifice is the most plausible interpretation. If these people had access to this universal moral axiom that killing babies is bad, why didn’t they derive laws or customs from it that would stop them from sacrificing babies?

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