Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

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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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