So, if I understand your point correctly, it's that the world is so mired in the use of violence, that logical discourse, a respect for facts, and the avoidance of mental patterns of hate is pointless hypocrisy because everyone is essentially either already guilty of being part of the violence or on the receiving end of it. Therefore, there are no moral limits on the behavior or speech of the victims and those who claim to be siding with them.

Strangely enough, such an ideology could just as well justify the actions of groups like ISIS as much as your "rustling of jimmies" on the Internet. And by this, I am not merely tarring your idea by association. The logical structure of it is essentially identical to the ideology of groups who adopt tactics commonly called "terrorism." The magnitude of the evil of one party doesn't give free reign to the victims. That can only lead to an eye for an eye.

Outrage is a powerful force. It can be harnessed for good as well as evil. So whether outrage is being harnessed for good, or whether it has become the "tail wagging the dog" using the cover of a pseudo-activism like a parasitic host to create more outrage is an important distinction. I would posit that a clear sign of this is a concern for morality in the conduct of activism, a concern for morality and fairness in its communications, and a clarity of moral understanding in its teachings. What's more, the immorality of "the oppressors" cannot modify the moral requirements of the activism in a way that renders the activism indistinguishable from the oppressors.

Lastly: From the tenor of your comment, it would seem that my writings have touched a nerve.

EDIT: It further occurs to me -- Activism must inherently contain some measure of extra-legality. Often it contains some small element of violence. Even holding hands to block stock brokers from entering a building for an extra 3 seconds is technically an act of violence. However, these actions are carefully considered in an overall moral framework. The care with which actions are considered and taken must be much like the care taken by surgeons. While it can well be energized by outrage, it is the very last sort of thing which should be ruled and guided by outrage.

Let's establish one thing first, and it's that I'm not a teenager and therefore my command of language is such that I have some degree of control over the tone I convey in writing. It does not take a struck nerve to litter someone's writing with fucks and write pointedly. Your writing style is as artificial as mine and I find its dryness uncomfortable to the eyes.

> So, if I understand your point correctly, it's that the world is so mired in the use of violence, that logical discourse, a respect for facts, and the avoidance of mental patterns of hate is pointless hypocrisy because everyone is essentially either already guilty of being part of the violence or on the receiving end of it. Therefore, there are no moral limits on the behavior or speech of the victims and those who claim to be siding with them.

You have a moral framework. It emphasizes rationality and strongly penalizes emotion. I could write endlessly- but I won't, about how naive frameworks like this can be. I won't say yours is because we're speaking in ridiculous abstractions and I don't have a concrete example. You haven't even named a single instance of outrage on the Internet to demonstrate the validity of your sentiments. So really there's a lot of vague language that clearly resonates with many people but clearly doesn't resonate with me; it's possible a more concrete example would sit better or it might be that I could vehemently disagree with any particular moral judgment you'd like to offer up.

Moral frameworks exist strictly in the mind. This is not to say that morality isn't real. I personally am a moral realist but I acknowledge the epistemological problems inherent in applying a mental framework to the world. When you talk about "logical discourse" you are merely saying that if you disagree with someone, they are being illogical. When you talk about "a respect for facts" you are merely saying that if you disagree with someone, they are being disingenuous about their observations. When you talk about "mental patterns of hate", which is a real mouthful for "hateful behavior", what you are saying is that if someone claims grievance or conflict that you disagree with, they are being hateful.

I am emphatically not saying that there are no moral limits. That's fucking asinine. The issue is, everyone is justified in their own moral framework. Everyone sees themself as logical. Everyone sees the facts as they see them. Everyone thinks their anger is righteous. You have named your values "logical discourse" and a "respect for facts" but that does not say what your values are. It does not say what logical reasoning you use to come to your conclusions. It does not say what your observational context is that determines how you interpret your experiences into facts. Your moral indignation is as petty and boring as everyone else's. You are not taking a high road. That's the point. No one has the right moral framework. The reality of morality is not making judgments according to the right principles because human principles can be internally consistent in one's mind or in a group's discourse without being reified into action consistently.

So when the West bombs Syria to stop Daesh, it is righteous according to their moral framework, but when they ravage the levant, install dictators, deny people their autonomy, reduce their cities to rubble and plunder them of their resources, their morality is deafeningly silent. Your moral framework is just as pernicious and flawed: It cannot police itself from being inconsistent. It cannot verify itself. It cannot claim possession of the truth.

People who engage in 'pseudo-activism', whatever the FUCK that is because it is your description is sorely lacking in specifics and feels like a philosophical boogeyman, they, too believe that they are being logical, and have a respect for the facts, and are fighting hate. It so happens that we were all inculcated in Enlightenment (capital L) values since the day we were born. I believe the difference between you and me is actually quite minuscule, because I wring my fingers over the failure of those values as they are reproduced materially.

I know this is, like, the most offensive word on Hacker News, but it pays to become acquainted with postmodernism. A little, tiny bit of critical theory goes a long way in ripping away the veil of false consciousness every moral framework and ideology creates. There is always a gap between mental conception and material implementation. It is that gap where good and evil fight.

Anyway: People get outraged because they think things are worth getting outraged about. You're not more correct because you aren't outraged. Your values are different. Your experiences are different. A human being is a vast, overwhelming compilation of lived experience. It is a cognitive bias that must be consciously suppressed that we can know other peoples' lives better than they can with a relative paucity of observations. You're not outraged because your values aren't being violated. They are outraged because they are. This is tautological.

Judging people is cheap. Finding out how they think, why they think it, what they see, how they see it, and what they value is difficult. A skillful apprehension of morality is one which enables understanding and communication. Blaming others for their failure to measure up to one's own morality is dry pablum for people who want to be reassured that the world is mad and they are not. It is moral elitism.

Also, those Internet activists aren't killing people. Seriously. There are far greater violations of morality in the world and they are in service of a status quo you take no outrage in. Because outrage is bad or something. Whatever.

People like you have existed since time immemorial. Pick any fight that moved the moral barometer in society towards a more harmonious status quo: There were people like you complaining about fake activists doing everything wrong and being just as bad as their oppressors because you don't like their behavior. You're not as knowledgeable of their motivations as you think you are and the world wouldn't magically solve all its problems if everyone just listened to you. I really hope your biggest complaint with the world isn't that people on the Internet have a greater stake in changing the status quo than you do.

This thread by its definition is controversial and lends itself to subjective option and heated discussion, more than others. At what point does opinion become 'ideology' as every single comment can be described as such, who decides the thin line between ideology and opinion and worse cross it to label and dismiss a 'comment' in this context as an 'inflammatory ideological rant'? This is extremely subjective and dangerous territory.

Abuse, snark and insult do not lend themselves to subjectivity and are easily flagged. But in this case I think the comment makes a genuine attempt to engage, reason and articulate a point of view, and is not dismissive or abusive but veers slightly to the personal as did the original commentator. But still deserves to be heard and not hidden. The warnings about abuse or bad language is not subjective and hold.

But it would be unfortunate to want to hide away articulated and reasoned responses one may not agree with as that inevitably leads to an echo chamber bereft of diversity, pushing away diverse opinions, and in effect making discussion pointless. In my case, rightly or wrongly, it discouraged me from reading the rest of the thread, as it appears anything diverse will be flagged and leave behind a sterile and uninteresting discussion.

Perhaps Hacker News is not the right forum for this discussion. How does one discuss violence against people and sometimes entire populations for political or other ends with a distant and dispassionate tone without coming off as passive and unfeeling, unlike a more technical subject in which passion may be misplaced and derail discussion.

The problem here isn't just one comment, though, but a history of making HN threads more toxic with incivility and inflammatory rhetoric. Doing that doesn't improve discussion; in the long run it destroys it. The whole of HN is organized to try to stave that off. If we have an existential concern, this is it.

I don't think bit-flipping arguments are valid here, i.e. arguments that acting to dampen one thing (incivility) will flip the system to its binary opposite (sterility). That's not how complex systems work. There's plenty of room for thoughtful discussion to flourish. On HN this happens when people take up the challenge of remaining civil and respectful, even when others are wrong or provocative. One can do that while still feeling strongly about a topic. Yes, it's hard, but not because of any contradiction in the spec.

Like, I'm not going to tell you how to run this ship because moderation can be a thankless job at the best of times.

The combination of ideology with indignation is most destructive of the discourse we want here. That doesn't mean your views aren't welcome. If you would err on the side of courtesy, it would probably solve the problem. Many HN users, including some of the most courteous commenters we have, have gone through a similar transformation. It mostly takes willingness, which comes more easily when you understand the problem the community faces.

The counterargument that matters of high moral importance deserve to be discussed with strong emotion has some truth to it, but only emotion that isn't contaminated with personal abusiveness qualifies. That takes self-discipline, especially in an online forum like HN, where we don't know each other personally, have only sparse signals to go on, and the bias when disagreeing is to fill in the picture uncharitably. To avoid that requires a conscious effort.

It's because I do not trash an arbitrary group of people. Instead, I condemn very specific emotional states resulting in very specific kinds of behavior -- ones which are specifically recognized as being uncivil and inherently intellectually dishonest. (And if you think otherwise, please provide quotes and justification. As I've noted elsewhere, you have this habit of assuming falsehoods about me and writing them in this thread, and never acknowledging them when called out.)

My understanding of your objection is this: Either you are embarrassed because you do these things, or you feel that I have concocted the above construction to purposely tar certain (unspecified) groups in a dishonest way. Please note that in your comments, you apparently jumped to conclusions about my political views. Can you provide quotes (relevant) which say what they are? (You'll be able to do this somewhat with sibling quotes, but this doesn't logically help you in terms of demonstrating you did not jump to such conclusions.) My objections are to particular psychological states and succumbing to the resulting cognitive distortions. You then proceeded to provide a demonstration of precisely these phenomena! Thank you!

I haven't thought my posts were toxic because they get good replies and they don't get downvote-hidden.

Strange, but some of your longest posts were very clearly downvote-greyed, particularly the most salient one referenced in this thread. This seems counter-factual.

Another falsehood of yours: You stated that I discount emotion. This is another clear example of your jumping to conclusions. Emotion cannot act as an "oracle" but nowhere do I state that it is worthless.

Let's break this down simply. I spoke out against (unspecified) misguided words and actions in the name of "activism" which are motivated by anger and outrage. I say that the same psychological mechanisms that are involved in out-grouping and hate are involved. You then produced a very long post trying to justify (unspecified) words and actions through the magnitude of crimes of oppressors, and apparently did this in a way many interpreted as a personal attack against me. (Then edited, apparently)

I would ask this -- what psychological state are you in, where you can have such a strong reaction to a opinion about unspecified words and actions? What psychological state are you in, where you keep on jumping to conclusions, writing falsehoods, then fail to acknowledge them?

Is it correct to say that you are attempting to defend and justify some prior words and actions of yours which were guided by outrage? Are you defending intellectual dishonesty, stereotyping, and emotional bullying done in the name of a cause? I sincerely hope you are, because in doing so, you have done much for my own cause. (Which is politically neutral and specifically against a particular group-psychological phenomenon.)

'danharaj responded by cherry picking a quote, calling it "fucking garbage", and then writing a short essay about why 'stdcredzero is a bad person.

Just because a comment doesn't contain the string "LOL UMAD" doesn't mean it's civil. There are very few occasions where a comment whose purpose is to single someone else on HN out as a bad person will survive, and I'm glad of that.

I'm glad I found this weird little thread, though, because I think those 'stdcredzero comments are great.

I disagree with the "ideological rant" part. Yes, Western military action in the Middle East is a classic flamewar topic, but for an article about violence that the perpetrators think is the moral thing to do, it's very much on-topic. Also, nobody else seems to be talking about the Overton window with regard to "extremes".

Ideally, everyone would steer clear of personal attacks regardless of the topic and regardless of provocation. (I see "it would seem that my writings have touched a nerve" as provocation.) But that's an awfully high bar to hold people to.

I vouched for the flagged comment because of its unique contribution to the discussion, even though I didn't like all the "you" parts.

Well, for one thing, are you asserting that it's not self-evident that he was incensed? It's pretty evident that he is. If the gentleman is indeed in a state of cognitive distortion driven by hate and groupthink, it could be useful to point it out to him. Getting him to at least the point where he acknowledges his hate, then has to justify having that hate is a step in the right direction.

Also, pointing such out for 3rd party readers may be beneficial for related reasons. He has at least admitted openly that he is in a state of anger and is in the process of justifying why he is right to be ruled by this mindstate.

It's the same as if you had said, "I see you're feeling emotional about this." It's technically true, but carries an implication that he's favoring emotion over rationality, when he could simply be rationally deciding that the status quo of how the West uses its military is something that one should be incensed about.

Some of those 3rd party readers may themselves be incensed. Some of those 3rd party readers may be so engaged in their anger-driven thought processes, they might benefit from an self-awareness of their being anger-driven. This is the sense in which I made my point regarding 3rd party readers.

It's the same as if you had said, "I see you're feeling emotional about this." It's technically true, but carries an implication that he's favoring emotion over rationality, when he could simply be rationally deciding that the status quo of how the West uses its military is something that one should be incensed about.

I thought it was clear that I'm not against his interpretation of military intervention as being either unjust or harmful. On that, we actually agree. Nor have I ever said he's wrong to feel outrage. (Note how he jumped to conclusions on both those counts! Part of the psychology!) Rather, I'm pointing out how he has used his outrage stemming from that as the justification for moral license based on moral relativism.

It's not the particular positions I'm speaking out for or against. I'm speaking out to raise awareness of certain psychological states which can arise in the practice of activism, and pointing out the problems they cause.

"But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

Outrage culture activists are children, morally speaking, who discovered a weapon, but have not learned how to use it responsibly.

Thinking others "have all the power" and themselves powerless, they ignore the harm they cause.

And one day they may awake to discover that they became the very thing they hated.

"You aren’t superior to the people who were cruel to you. You’re just a whole bunch of new cruel people."

Thank you very much for this excellent example! Please provide prior quotes that support your assertions with regard to my speech. If you cannot, then you are making things up in your comment, which is illogical and which does not run in accordance with a respect for facts. (And no, it's clearly not "kosher" to quote the above paragraph as evidence, as it directly references your text and was written after it. But please go ahead and provide more evidence for my position!)

Also, it is patently false to say I only label positions I disagree with as "hateful behavior." I would agree that there are certain standards in our society which should be changed, but I find some of the speech and actions taken in support of my positions to be intellectually void and repellent. Please provide quotes to the contrary, or be intellectually honest and admit you just wrote that with no factual justification.

Good cannot come of activism if hate is the driving force behind it. Expecting otherwise is like giving advice while being motivated by anger, then being surprised when some harm has resulted. Expecting good to come of activism that's guided and motivated by anger is like being a parent while working out your anger from childhood traumas, then being surprised when some harm comes of this.

> Also, it is patently false to say I only label positions I disagree with as "hateful behavior." I would agree that there are certain standards in our society which should be changed, but I find some of the speech and actions taken in support of my positions to be intellectually void and repellent

Well I don't think we should distinguish between the position and its means of implementation. Actually, that's exactly what I don't want to do. The means and the end, morally, aren't different. Every means is itself an end, composed with other ends in order to arrive at a final end. Moral judgment is valid at every stage. If the position is the tip of the spear, the means are the shaft.

So you are making a distinction that I am not. If you label something as "mental patterns of hate" and rejecting it on those grounds, you are, by definition making a moral judgment against it. Conversely I assume you have some set of values that constitute your moral framework and thus if you are judging something to be morally wrong, there exist some values that you would say are being violated. This, to me, is merely manipulation of definitions.

So the point I'm trying to convey is that the meaning of your morality beyond its internal model in your head depends on two things, which happen to be the same thing in different lights: How you interpret your observations into your moral framework, and how you reify your moral judgments into reality.

Again, it is the gap between the mental and the physical where good and evil fight.

What you consider hateful, I may not consider hateful, and conversely. What you consider illogical, I may consider logical, and conversely. And so on and so forth.

I have given you a concrete working example to demonstrate my moral logic. If you want me to engage yours in anything more specific than these generalities, I'd like you to produce a particular instance of this hateful pseudo-activism you condemned in the original post. Otherwise I'm not sure what more is to be said?

> Good cannot come of activism if hate is the driving force behind it. Expecting otherwise is like giving advice while being motivated by anger, then being surprised when some harm has resulted. Expecting good to come of activism that's guided and motivated by anger is like being a parent while working out your anger from childhood traumas, then being surprised when some harm comes of this.

I really don't want people unmotivated by anger to be activists. It means they don't actually perceive a personal injustice. If they don't perceive an injustice, what are they pushing for? There are too many activists who are along for the ride because they think they stand to gain from being an activist for the sake of being an activist. An angry activist is one who has a material goal in being an activist, who has some grievance or conflict that they demand be resolved. Anger is a valid emotion. Anger can be logical. Anger can flow from factual experience. Anger need not be hateful.

Excuse me, but have you read any history at all? The psychology of othering and its role in the justification of human evils is long and sordid.

What you consider hateful, I may not consider hateful

This is your word game of double standards. The hateful mindset in human brains is a tangible, measurable thing. There is no debate about this. Your cop-out is nothing more than a common-sense defying ideological re-labelling.

I have given you a concrete working example to demonstrate my moral logic.

I also note that you have not given me quotes to back your 3 unjustified assertions (attempt to put words in my mouth) which I called out. This kind of cognitive distortion resulting in a lack of intellectual dishonesty is something that I have observed in association with hateivism, and is simultaneously a symptom and pernicious effect.

I really don't want people unmotivated by anger to be activists.

Read carefully much? In a preceding comment, I make a point of saying it's ok for people to be motivated by anger in activism. The problem is when it becomes the guiding force.

I'll just put this here and leave:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_asymmetric_insight

Have you noticed that you keep generating falsehoods because you keep jumping to conclusions or making assumptions about me? (I keep having to point these things out. None of which you have bothered to acknowledge, by the way. That is not intellectually honest.) On the contrary, I have often encountered de-facto hate. To the point where police got involved, caught the perpetrators, then had to ask me not to press charges to keep the event of their records.

You're just making grandiose statements about your comprehension of other human beings

There is a wealth of historical and philosophical writing about how group psychology and hate works. You might recognize some of the names, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. There are a number of relevant psychological studies as well. If you study those writings then re-read what you have written here on HN and were honest with yourself, you might well become embarrassed.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_asymmetric_insight

It's amazing how people who have succumbed to ideologies of hate and who are self-justifying this manage to point fingers in a way that implicates themselves -- and how unaware they are of this.

The reason for this is that I've become increasingly convinced that the health of a community, especially one that relies on a relatively poor medium (text comments), is very dependent on the civility of said community.

I'm a bit surprised to find myself believing this, as only a few years ago I would've argued that civility often gets in the way of the facts, that it obfuscates 'true' discussion and exchange of information, and 'enlightenment'.

I changed my view because I started noticing that even in 'rich' face-to-face interactions, once a certain 'detached' civility is abandoned, the more intense language almost inevitably leads at least one of the parties involved to become more emotionally invested in the conversation, and this in turn pulls a 'discussion/conversation' into the direction of an 'argument/fight'.

This is not always a problem in rich media. In the same way that a parent getting angry can sometimes be more effective than a parent logically dishing out an appropriate punishment, I've experienced plenty of situations where the visible emotions of someone I disagreed with were necessary to make me pause and reconsider my point of view (because I respected said person and/or clearly they didn't hold their beliefs lightly).

But the 'poorer' a medium, and the weaker the bonds of a community, the more important civility is. Because it's really easy to get exceptionally pissed off, misinterpret, project, or escalate things in reaction to a piece of text linked to a pseudonym.

There is no way to know if that statement is ever true.

So while I can't prove if it's true, in the same way that I can't prove a lot of things to be true, I don't think it's such an outrageous statement, both based on experience and based on logical reasoning.

I'm curious why you decided to comment on this though. Mind elaborating? Is it because anger is not generally a very good parenting technique? Because if so, I fully agree with that, and was not suggesting otherwise.

I'm not sure what the right answer (if there even is one) in this situation is, but one interesting thought I had while reading your most recent comment:

>The handful of times that my actions caused one or both of my parents to 'lose their shit' (and at times even apologize for that later) are etched in my mind, deservedly so, and they kept me from ever doing that particular thing again. In contrast, the vast majority of other things I was punished for required repeat offenses and repeated and increasing punishment before I cleaned up my act.

Was:

One way to resolve this with the original statement ("In the same way that a parent getting angry can sometimes be more effective than a parent logically dishing out an appropriate punishment") is to say that your parents losing their shit over your behavior was the logical punishment. :)

It was just one example, but I could name many others like it. From the discussions I've had with friends over issues where clearly my or their getting 'upset' effectively ended the discourse and made both of us 'dig in', to situations with colleagues where my or their increasingly forceful insistence only led to the opposite outcome. In most cases my experience has been, over and over again, that most of the time, once civility and a certain emotional distance is abandoned, the outcome suffers from it, often for both parties.

That said, I think you make a good point. There's a time and place for abandoning civility, and I do occasionally feel that also here on HN civility is used defensively for the wrong purposes. I'm inclined to think the dangers of abandoning this 'civility' are greater on HN and other internet forums than their benefits, in part because HN is one of the few places where I still feel there's worthwhile discussion going on, and I want it to remain that way. I've found myself reading, say, /r/programming threads where I was surprised by the high amount of memes, personal attacks and/or knee-jerk comments because I thought I was on HN. I've left a number of forums in my lifetime because they turned to shit because of toxic members. That's the main reason why I err on the side of civility.

But, again, all that said, I do agree with you, and you provided a valuable counterpoint that I haven't considered in a while. Sometimes losing your shit is the right thing, and just as much as I don't want to be a reactionary, knee-jerk, over-emotional commenter, I also don't want err toward the opposite end of the spectrum.

No, it's more about understanding. Personally, I would rather see the context and know something about the conflict than see [flagged] and see worthy rebuttals out of context.

That said, we don't do that here, and there is value to be had. Happy to comply. There are lots of places to have that kind of dialog. I enjoy them, as I enjoy it here.

One thing I have noticed is rules about civility do tend to elevate and favor people with highly toxic views. Rebutting them without violating the rules is difficult.

But, it is possible to do. There is value in that skill as well.

My objection centers on the violation and valid, compliant responses to a hidden comment. We lose something there I would rather not lose.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

if you want an awful toxic place, go to any other forum on the Internet with as many readers. There you can find knee-jerk, shallow, abusive arguments from people who, actually, don't even mean it and often have nothing to say. The reason you enjoy HN is because it has rules against this kind of discourse.

jsprogrammer's reply to you is a great example: it is a very civil comment that follows the discourse here, i.e. is written in the exact opposite way from what it argues for. It would not be improved if intsead it read, in full, "only third-rate management cocksuckers need to obfuscate everything in warm fuzzies."

Edit: typo.

For technical, business, and many policy type conversations, your comment has merit. Some. I do not agree much with third rate...

But, a lot of conversation is actually advocacy, and when it goes there, all modes are relevant: emotion, reason, character.

Requiring people to limit advocacy to the rational only is not realistic, nor inclusive enough to make sense.

I think there is a similar trend in such communities (cf. Yudkowsky's Politics is the Mind Killer) to pretend to be apolitical, but insisting that one is apolitical merely obfuscates ones political values. Civil tone and apolitical politics are a popular sentiment amongst the type who seek to align their values with rationality.

You can be perfectly logical and also completely emotional. There is no antagonism between the two. Logic is emotional. One wouldn't bother writing out a logical argument without feeling it has some worth, right? Value is fundamentally emotional. Emotions are logical: They are responses and interpretations of stimuli that are predictable and behave according to rules that vary from person-to-person but have a common basis in all human beings. They have meaning, they can be analyzed and synthesized, and they can be communicated to others just like logical propositions and proofs.

Failing to communicate emotionally can lead to strong emotions on two sides of a discussion. One can think of it as boosting a signal to try to get it through. If one or both sides are unreceptive to the other's emotions, then this leads to a death spiral for the conversation. I think it is this phenomenon, the failure to communicate emotionally, which is being conflated with the presence of emotion. The solution isn't to maintain politeness and throw out emotions altogether, it is to learn how to spot breakdowns in communication and bring them into the conversation so they can be resolved.

Breakdowns in logic happen all the time. If one values rational discourse highly, then these are considered important to resolve, not ignore. God knows I've stood in front of a blackboard trying to get a mathematician to explain something to me, with the explanation failing to get through to me. I once spent 2 hours trying to construct the tensor of two vector spaces because I was a wee undergrad and constructing such widgets was new to me, but I had a patient grad student to guide me along. The breakdowns in logical communication were immense, and certainly there was communication of frustration and reassurance. Ironically in such a dry, logical matter, the emotional communication was excellent and the logical communication-- not so much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion

After you've written all that, spend a few minutes eliminating some of it. you would be one of the best contributors after doing so. no, you don't actually need to swear but can if you want to. good luck.

2. Statu quo is not what you try to make out of your examples (there is no such thing as an unanimous moral framework in the West, and what you describe is not even building a statu quo, but more chaos).

There is a de facto unanimous moral framework in the West. It is the moral framework of the states and supranational institutions like the UN, the IMF, etc. Authoritarian ideologies always try to make themselves invisible, neutral, but they are not.

Relativity comes up in mathematics all the time. Relativity isn't the idea that there is no one truth, it is the idea that there is one truth but it cannot be described from a single point of view. The points of view are relative, but they are all views into the same truth.

Morality can be the same way. You can be a moral realist and still acknowledge that apprehension of morality is observer dependent. Then the game becomes figuring out the rules of relativity for morality. That is, figuring out how to communicate moral perceptions and judgments between people.

I think the biggest cause of immorality is that we assume morality cannot be treated logically and scientifically, and instead call it the province of faith. Faith has proven itself wholly unsuited as arbitrator of morality. Maybe it's time to give science and logic a go at it.

Moral relativism is invoked almost exclusively by people trying to justify their own actions, after they find that many object to their actions.

Faith has proven itself wholly unsuited as arbitrator of morality. Maybe it's time to give science and logic a go at it.

Any evidence-based system would be better than any system that ignores evidence. We have scientific evidence that the psychology of hate is tangible and specific in how it manifests. We have literally thousands of years of observations and ruminations on this topic, including the teachings of the major world religions.

Culture and society can be surprisingly good at dealing with largely invisible and quite subtle psychology. (Example: love/lust/dating -- Average people are actually quite sophisticated in how they perceive and deal with this.) But societies and cultures are constructed in such a way as to make group psychology around group membership invisible. Group psychology is part of what societies are made out of so the products of group psychology are promulgated as truth.

It's no accident that two different activist movements that are praised for their moral understanding -- those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. -- were effectively structured around the prevention of pathological group-think and othering. I think a subtle societal understanding of such group-think is the last great barrier to humanity's "Waking up from History."

Your syllogism equivocates on the concept "observation" and does not follow. The "observation" of measuring velocities and the "observation" of self and others to derive a moral principle are not the same concept or cognitive process.

> Morality can be the same way. You can be a moral realist and still acknowledge that apprehension of morality is observer dependent. Then the game becomes figuring out the rules of relativity for morality.

Moral discussions are not a "game" since lives and, ultimately, civilization hangs in the balance.

>That is, figuring out how to communicate moral perceptions and judgments between people.

But by rejecting any objective basis for morality you throw out any possible means for agreement. Moreover, your position assumes two things that the radical Islamists do not share; the value of a human life (in the here-and-now not some fantasy world) and that reason, not guns, are the means for resolving disagreements among civilized men.

How do you deal with someone who not only doesn't share your moral "sentiments" but wants to actually kill you? Is there some basis to compromise in this case? Why do we shoot lions and bears instead of trying to reason with them? Is it moral for you to kill a fly in your house? What if I disagree and claim all life is sacred and you have a moral duty to leave the bugs alone and I am willing to use my guns to protect them from you? On what grounds could you possible oppose someone like that if you really believe morality is relative (i.e. subjective)?

I was going more for an analogy than an equality. I also did not mean to imply that the relevant moral observations are how one derives moral principles. The relevant observations are the questions: "I perceive situation X in reality. Is injustice present? Who has been aggrieved, and is there an aggressor?"

These are clearly observer dependent.

> Moral discussions are not a "game" since lives and, ultimately, civilization hangs in the balance

I vacillated on using the word game. The game isn't morality, but pondering what morality is. If I had called it a thought exercise I think it would have had slightly better connotations. I call processes of cognition games perhaps too often.

With respect to objectivity: Not even scientists attempt to achieve objectivity. They merely attempt to reach consensus. It can be a bitter and contentious process in even the most quantified sciences. For example, the disagreement over whether tetraquarks exist [1]. Objectivity is a naive concept. You cannot prove that your perception of objectivity is, well, objective. Objectivity is at best a useful fiction. It's actually a very useful fiction! But it can fail because one's understanding of objectivity cannot verify that it is objective.

I think you can imagine a kind of person who claims that others lack objectivity when they are disagreed with. They exist everywhere. There's a named logical fallacy for this kind of behavior. Demanding one's morality be objective does not make one's morality objective, but it means that every moral judgment one makes is now self-judged to be objective. The moral framework can be internally consistent but inconsistent in its reification into material judgments and actions.

> Moreover, your position assumes two things that the radical Islamists do not share; the value of a human life (in the here-and-now not some fantasy world) and that reason, not guns, are the means for resolving disagreements among civilized men.

Ok, so we're talking about "radical Islamists" now, so I'll assume you mean Daesh because the vague "radical Islam" is just a snarl phrase. Is Saudi Arabia an example of radical Islam? They're an ally to the United States. Notice how the countries that claim "reason, not guns, are the means for resolving disagreements" quite willingly and openly and readily act in direct contradiction of those ideals. There is a discrepancy between what people say morality is and what they do. Everyone loves their morality when it permits them to dominate others and shape the world the way they see fit. Everyone's morality permits them to commit atrocities.

I am a moral realist. I merely make the claim that a person should not believe they have a direct apprehension of moral truth because such a belief compromises the ability to apprehend moral truth. Therefore I demand of a person's moral framework that it be oriented towards analyzing and understanding differences between people's moral judgments. If I assume I am capable of understanding moral reality and meet someone who disagrees with me, I can either conclude they are incapable of the same understanding or the disagreement stems from different vantage points.

Believing two moral individuals can come up with different moral judgments in the same situation is the only sensible starting point towards reconciling conflicts. Understanding why moral people can come to different moral conclusions is the fundamental mechanism of justice. Otherwise violently asserting one's moral truth is the only mechanism.

> How do you deal with someone who not only doesn't share your moral "sentiments" but wants to actually kill you? Is there some basis to compromise in this case? Why do we shoot lions and bears instead of trying to reason with them? Is it moral for you to kill a fly in your house? What if I disagree and claim all life is sacred and you have a moral duty to leave the bugs alone and I am willing to use my guns to protect them from you? On what grounds could you possible oppose someone like that if you really believe morality is relative (i.e. subjective)?

I think you're missing the point. Just because science is supposed to be done via reproducing experiments and corroborating results between different scientists doesn't mean that science is paralyzed by the existence of a person who believes in crank theories and cannot properly run experiments and thus cannot effectively communicate their scientific activities to other scientists. Likewise my morality isn't paralyzed by hypothetical bug-zealots who act maximally unreasonably. If you believe the world is filled to the brim with brutish idiots with whom you cannot possibly communicate moral sentiments, well, I'll have you know there are plenty of them that feel exactly the same about you. How are you different? Your internal moral framework is no proof to me that you have a correct moral understanding of anything.

Here's a better example: You come across two kids at a playground. One sticks their tongue out at the other who then throws a punch and starts a fight.

30 seconds earlier, I saw the kid sticking their tongue out shove that other kid to the ground. Then I saw exactly what you saw.

I'm pretty sure our moral judgments are going to be different.

The real world is vastly more complicated than this contrived example. When you come into moral conflict with other people you can either assume they're a bunch of illogical, fact-spurning hate machines like the top-level comment in this thread[2], or you can believe that your difference in values and moral judgment of a situation arise from a difference in context which can be reconciled through communication and deliberation. If humans can't practically know everything in order to come to an absolute moral judgment, human morality is functionally observer dependent. That doesn't mean there isn't a moral reality that doesn't care about the vagaries of human perception and social context, it's just not practically accessible.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140827-quark-quartet-fuels-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_asymmetric_insight

    - Killing -- Try really, really hard not to do this!
    - Lying -- Please try really, really hard not to do this!

But the points I am making in these comments aren't really about details. In the broad outlines of morality, when someone starts proclaiming loudly that they are justified in being a jerk -- it's time to start getting very skeptical! This applies just as well to people, governments, and "activist" groups.

And by all means, please take some time to be a bit skeptical about yourself! Again, this applies just as well to people, governments, and "activist" groups.

Let's assume everybody agreed with the "Really try hard to not be a jerk!" and everybody would have 100% similar general picture of what is moral.

Two people still interpret a situation from two points of view. Both making the judgement that the other guy is out of bounds. Which justifies some apprehension. But they both experience wrongful apprehension, which justifies pretty big apprehension. Which could result in full riot.

My point is that you cannot talk about ethics from individual point of view and expect to solve problems. You have to take into account societies as whole. Then consider with how it's done in practice. Ethical society cannot exist without good laws and good guardians for those laws. (And with 99% of population behaving good 99% of the time.)

Skeptical is not enough. Society has to be a instant jerk towards individuals who try to jerk around. Clear cut boundaries are needed, so you know to stay inside them.

I'd say there is no place for moral relativism inside a country. But between countries it's even necessary.

1) Randomly divide people into two groups.

2) Ask everyone in the first group this question: "If someone sues you and loses, is it fair that they should pay your legal costs?" Most people will say yes.

3) Ask everyone in the second group this question: "If you sue someone and lose, is it fair that you should pay their legal costs?" Most people will say no. Even though it's the same fucking question.

That's why we need shared enforced norms :-)

But I'd offer you a [bayesian] counter-argument: Say an HIV test is 99% accurate and responds positive on a randomly selected person. What's the chance they actually have HIV? About 5%! [0]. However, if you have prior reasons to believe you may have HIV, the chances are a lot higher than 5% given a positive test.

To tie that back to lawsuits, your participants in the study have their priors set so that they don't expect to engage in frivolous lawsuits towards anyone. However they will likely recognize that they could fall victim to a frivolous lawsuit, and if they're normal, then the only type of lawsuits they could imagine being forced on them is a frivolous suit.

Another way to say that is: probably 90% of the ridiculous lawsuits originate from 1% of the population. Then 99% of your participants will mentally model themselves as a sincere plaintiff (thus they shouldn't have to pay even if they lose), while a 1% frivolous rate is certainly high enough to make plausible the threat of being the defendant, and thus worthy of protection through legal fee reimbursement.

[0]: http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs199/lectures/34-bayes-rule.html

As the grandparent comment pointed out, there is no objective source of morality on any issue. As the OP pointed out, most people don't loudly proclaim themselves to be jerks. Outside of sociopaths and those with mental disorders, most people lie, kill and hate because they think it's somehow the right thing to do. Or because they can rationalize acting in their own self interest to be somehow fair or in the greater good.

Though the article tried to end on a positive tone, I found it to be pretty disheartening. It's easy to say "Don't be hateful", but much more difficult to say "Don't do what you think is right". Ain't no solution for that.

What was done under the leadership of MLK and Gandhi had an acute awareness of how the instincts around "othering" could take hold of an activist group. I wish there was much more of that today.

As another example (from what I've understood about some Asian cultures), "no" is considered rude in some cultures. It's quite acceptable in those cultures to end a business conversation with "I'll get back to you on that" and then never do. They wouldn't even consider it lying, they would consider it "the right thing to do".

I don't think one necessarily must claim to know /why/ there is a fact of the matter as to what things are moral, in order to be justified in one's claim that there /is/ a fact of the matter?

Moral nihilism can fall down a well. (Note: I mean moral nihilism, not moral nihilists. Rhetoric. I don't have much against nihilists, except that I believe they are incorrect, and it is sometimes kind of scary to need to trust them?)