In college I was asked the following question by a Sociology professor, and it always hits home when these battles of opposing moralities arise:

How would you explain to a Nihilist that your morals are superior to the morals of those you consider reprehensible?

The pre requisite would be to explain that hierarchies of values exist. If you get there, you are no longer facing a nihilist, hence you can focus on arguing the superiority of your moral value.

I disagree you'd no.longer be facing a Nihilist. You might get them to consider the merit of a viewpoint versus another, but they still wouldn't really care about any viewpoint presented. A dyed in the wool Nihilist would only provide objective judgement, but adopt no position.

"Explaining" wouldn't magically turn a lot of nihilists I agree. A dyed in the wool as you said would not even listen to an explanation, she would hear it, and camp on their no position. There is something contradictory about nihilists, only their view is valid. The view that no view other than theirs is better than any other, and even if some obviously are, they are meaningless anyway. Unless it impacts them as individuals of course.

I'm not arguing that a discussion with an entrenched Nihilist has much chance to have value, but since I'm not a Nihilist I see value in that discussion, even when it was a lost cause.

I don’t know why, but I hate that question (at least in this context). It seems like it is shifting the question of ethics into some sort of meta-ethics. I wonder if you professor was used to formulate an ethical argument, but I personally find it very hard. This might be a good advice in competitive debate, but when you are facing a real argument in the real world where somebody is claiming to be a moral superior I don’t know if this is a helpful advice. E.g. I have no idea how to explain to a nihilist that murdering humans is worse then killing animals for meat. Is that even possible?

I'm legitimately glad to see this is making so many uncomfortable - that's a base component of robust discussion, delving into the uncomfortable. If you're down voting, please share the reasons why to further discussion.

I wouldn't. Arguing with a Nihilist is like arguing with a flat earther - they are so disconnected from reality it doesn't make sense.

This is phenomenal food for thought. The kind of comment I come to HN for.

This made me think; thanks. :)

I suspect you will sing a different tune the day "big tech" takes a moral position you disagree with.

I'm going to somewhat sarcastically link to a dril tweet here.

https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312?lang=en

For those that don't want to go to twitter:

`the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"`

I don't want to add a ton of exposition to this, but I also don't want this to be a reddit-level comment where I just link to something and bounce so I will add that clearly someone doing something because it is moral and just like hampering the collection of abortion bounties is better than someone doing something immoral and unjust like hampering access to abortions.

It isn't about what I agree and disagree with, it's about what's actually right and wrong.

In prehistoric days, killing another man to protect your own food was "right".

The Aztecs had no problem sacrificing people, and many sought it out (it's theorized) given that it guaranteed you a place next to the sun and thus in paradise, eternally drunk.

Extremists even today believe in a paradise-after-death if they sacrifice themselves for god. To a lesser extent, self-flagellation (whipping oneself for religious purposes) is still prevalent in many cultures and sects of e.g. Christianity/Catholocism today.

"Right" and "wrong" change over time, and with culture. Thus they are subjective - there is no objective "right" and "wrong". In this sense, your last sentence relates two identical things - what you might agree with and disagree with are your own perception of "right" and "wrong".

It's a somewhat flawed and (in my opinion) dangerous way of thinking about social interaction and morality.

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E: Because I know this will be mis-interpreted, let me be clear: the website in question is, in my opinion, abhorrent - but I think it's dangerous to celebrate a large company taking it down on the grounds of morality. I understand it was taken down as it specifically violated a pre-existing clause in their ToS which makes it make sense in this case. But to say that this is a great thing and we should do this for people that are "wrong" is beginning down a path that nobody really wants.

The dril tweet applies nearly equally to your response as it did when I first linked it.

You're incorrect about right and wrong changing over time. Even with that information though, it doesn't matter for what I said to still be correct both CURRENTLY (which fits your incorrect ideas of morality) and more broadly.

> You're incorrect about right and wrong changing over time

Care to elaborate?

Taking away another human beings right to make decisions about their own body is a bad thing. Always has been, and always will.

to be clear, the position here is “turn in a woman for cash because she exercised bodily autonomy”

this isn’t really slippery slope, there are so many red flags here

This isn't a slippery slope because it's the bottom of the slope we slid down.

What's inexcusable is for a business entity to apply discrimination on moral grounds. Ideally, politicians should also stay away from the moral debate. We've seen what this can lead to.

Reality here is that godaddy gave an unreasonably small time window for a site shutdown, simply because of their fear of the backslash from the public causing PR damage hence revenue loss.

What doesn't sit right with me is that a lot of this stuff is becoming very polarized. The same thing happened with Parler, when AWS et al just decided that it was too toxic to do business with and suspended the platform's infrastructure.

It seems to me that nobody on either side wants to tolerate freedom of speech. When you see something you don't like, the answer is tolerance, not "This person/thing/company" should go away and never come back. I'm just starting to see it far too often where something gets "cancelled" because it makes some subset of people uncomfortable. Inevitably the pendulum will swing the other way, and those who engage in this kind of activity aren't going to like the precedent they've set.

> What's inexcusable is for a business entity to apply discrimination on moral grounds.

Should a business be "moral less" and allow all behavior?

The idea that we should embrace cold, profit-only business entities is much more reprehensible to me.

Yes, related to their area of business. What is “cold” about making profits to you? Personally, the locus of morality is my religious/ethnic community. Businesses should focus on making money so they can pay people who can use that money to be moral in their own communities.

Which would be fine, except ya know not, serving cakes to gay people.

The problem is certain groups want to have their cake and eat it too. There is no consistency.

The baker offered to serve his cakes to gay people, he just didn't want to be compelled to create a cake he didn't like.

GoDaddy offered to serve websites to Texans, they just didn't want to be compelled to serve a website they didn't like.