Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's worth quoting an extract from http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_sy... 's discussion of Qing Chinese law:

> There are multiple cases where someone commits an offense on orders from a superior member of his extended family; the attitude of the court seems to be that although he must obey the order he is still criminally liable for the act; there appears to be no assumption in the legal system that an individual always has the option of acting in a way that does not violate one rule or another.

When I read this, it was more interesting to me that American society is fairly committed to the fiction that such an option always exists.

I don't believe that the mere fact that a person took some action itself demonstrates that the person believed that action to be morally blameless. Of two paths, both can be wrong. Of many paths, all can be wrong -- or the conseqences of staying on the "right" one might be personally unbearable. I imagine that a mother who opted not to rescue her child from a burning building might be haunted by the thought that this was wrong, regardless of a generally positive message from society.

Also, I've tried really hard to read your comment in a way that allows for the existence of guilt. I can't see it. Do you believe people can feel guilt? Why would C. S. Lewis feel sorrow, in the privacy of his own mind, to discover that he is the kind of person who would do certain things?

I can not perceive of right and wrong as absolute concepts. Only as concepts which exist when comparing one possible outcome relatively to others. People use some factors to inevitably choose between the choices they see available to them, they will choose what they perceive as having the outcome they desire given those decision trees that they construct. An outcome which they can not see a path to is not a choice, it effectively does not yet exist so they can not choose it.

Guilt to me is what people feel when they realize they made decisions with incorrect or incomplete information, and would of made them differently had they known. Even when the person had no way of knowing the correct or complete information at the time of decision making, in this edge case society has developed a term to attempt to remove guilt from the person by calling it an 'accident'. Often I find the source of guilt to be not looking very far ahead on the decision trees which I eliminate early on as not effecting me. (Guilt can also be simply an act, as demonstrating guilt often leads to fewer negative consequences in our society. Think of all the people convicted where not demonstrating remorse was used as a factor in sentencing or parole denial.)

> Guilt to me is what people feel when they realize they made decisions with incorrect or incomplete information, and would of made them differently had they known.

That's wrong. This is regret.

> I can not perceive of right and wrong as absolute concepts.

That's fine. But you're here denying that other people can and do. You're wrong about that.

No, it is not. Regret does not require you to currently see a way for you to of made decisions which would of led to a more desirable outcome had you known (you may see them but it is not required). You can have regret over the passing of you cat, even though you know there was nothing you could of done to prevent it. Guilt is a regret but with you having the idea that it could of been prevented and a better outcome achieved had you done something differently.

Can they though? Or are people just too arrogant to admit that they can not define them in absolute terms, and if they can what could the definition of right be besides 'what is most beneficial among possible outcomes' and wrong be 'what is not most beneficial among possible outcomes'? That can not in my opinion be a definition of anything absolute as it varies based on the circumstances and individual values.

Feel free to propose an absolute version of right and wrong, to me it seems like an impossible task, but perhaps you could enlighten me. Until this last reply you had asked very good questions, showing that you welcome discourse on the subject, and I hope you can return to doing so rather than simply stating that I am wrong.

Look, here's the relevant sense of guilt (that is, the sense unrelated to the legal system) from Merriam-Webster:

> a bad feeling caused by knowing or thinking that you have done something bad or wrong

Here it is from Cambridge:

> Guilt is also a feeling of anxiety or unhappiness that you have done something immoral or wrong, such as causing harm to another person: She was tormented by feelings of guilt after putting her mother in a nursing home.

There is no requirement that things could have gone differently, or that if they could have gone differently a different outcome would have been better.

Your definition is not compatible with this, or even related to this. You've stated fairly clearly that you don't believe guilt exists. That's odd, but defensible. (Though trust me, you're wrong.) Pretending it means something other than what everyone but you thinks it means isn't defensible.

> Feel free to propose an absolute version of right and wrong, to me it seems like an impossible task

I didn't say there was an absolute definition of right and wrong. I said there are people who conceive of the world this way, and that's true; they are quite numerous. By weakening to just the idea that certain actions in a definite fixed context could be correctly labeled "right" or "wrong", you pick up many, many more believers, practically the entire world.

I personally do not see a conflict with how I define guilt and how Webster defines it. And while not in perfect agreement with the Cambridge definition, I see them as similar.

I mean how can you be aware you have done something wrong or bad if you do see what could of been a better outcome? If everything you have to compare it to as possible outcomes is worse than what happened then you did nothing wrong or bad, you did the best that was possible.

I was never intending to say guilt does not exist just that it simply as Webster has defined and that choosing solutions which you later realize are sub-optimal are what Webster describes as something bad or wrong. I am not pretending it means anything other than what you have provided here as the definition. How can one recognize bad without good? These things are inherently relative as one can not exist without the other also existing.

>I didn't say there was an absolute definition of right and wrong. I said there are people who conceive of the world this way, and that's true; they are quite numerous.

How does one conceive of something which can not be defined? To me that seems like being able to visualize the concept of infinity. It can be defined in a relative sense, so I stand by my view that the relative sense is the only one that matters.

>By weakening to just the idea that certain actions in a definite fixed context could be correctly labeled "right" or "wrong", you pick up many, many more believers, practically the entire world.

I think you underestimate the cultural differences present in the world and the ability of anyone to actually define a fixed context which 'practically the entire world' will be able to relate to.

Any scenario you did manage to get 'practically the entire world' to agree on would be so vague and hypothetical as to be virtually meaningless. Like 'would you give everyone in the world cancer or ice cream', although the example I have provided itself is flawed I think most examples will have flaws. In my example if people have a violent enough allergy to ice cream they may in fact choose cancer as being "right".

This has been a rather long way about this but do you at least concede that we do indeed have different ideas of what a belief is and that only a small number of people if any would have beliefs which were consistent with both our definitions?

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