Moral frameworks function the same way. Without one, you have a disconnected list of "things that provoke disgust" and "things that get you punished"... but no way to reason about novel cases or conflicts between values, or explain why these various intuitions cluster together. Why does "hunting babies" feel similar to "torturing prisoners" but different from "eating chicken"? A moral framework provides the structure; raw disgust does not.
For child sacrifice: humans also once believed disease came from evil spirits, that the earth was the center of the universe, that heavier objects fall faster. Does the existence of these errors make physics and biology "redundant frameworks"? Obviously not. it means humans can be wrong, and can reason from false premises. Notice that even cultures practicing child sacrifice typically had strict rules about when, how, and which children could be sacrificed. This suggests they recognized the moral weight of taking a child's life! They just had false beliefs about gods, afterlives, and cosmic bargains that led them to different conclusions. They weren't operating without moral frameworks; they were operating with moral frameworks plus false empirical/metaphysical beliefs.
More importantly, your framework cannot account for moral progress! If morality is just "what currently provokes disgust," then the abolition of child sacrifice wasn't progress. It was merely a change in fashion, no different from skinny jeans becoming not skinny. But you clearly do think those cultures were wrong (you're citing child sacrifice as a historical horror, not a neutral anthropological curiosity). That normative judgment requires exactly the moral framework you're calling redundant.
> More importantly, your framework cannot account for moral progress!
I don’t think “moral progress” (or any other kind of “progress”, e.g. “technological progress”) is a meaningful category that needs to be “accounted for”.
> Why does "hunting babies" feel similar to "torturing prisoners" but different from "eating chicken"?
I can see “hunting babies” being more acceptable to “torturing prisoners” to many people. Many people don’t consider babies on par with grown-up humans due to their limited neurological development and consciousness. Vice versa, many people find the idea of eating chicken abhorrent and would say that a society of meat-eaters is worse than a thousand Nazi Germanies. This is not a strawman I came up with, I’ve interacted with people who hold this exact opinion, and I think from their perspective it is justified.
> [Without a moral framework you have] no way to reason about novel cases
You can easily reason about novel cases without a moral framework. It just won’t be moral reasoning (which wouldn’t add anything in itself). Is stabbing a robot to death okay? We can think about in terms of how I feel about it. It’s kinda human-shaped, so I’d probably feel a bit weird about it. How would others react to me stabbing it this way? They’d probably feel similarly. Plus, it’s expensive electronics, people don’t like wastefulness. Would it be legal? Probably.
At least the discussion with skissane was intellectually interesting, so I didn't bother using AI for those comments.
But seriously, you can just throw your entire conversation into AI and ask "who is philosophically and logically correct between these responses". Remove the usernames if you want a fair analysis. Even an obsolete AI like GPT-3.5 will be able to tell you the correct answer for that question. The reasoning is just... soooo obviously... similar to if a senior engineer looked at a junior engineer's code, and facepalmed. It looks like that, but replace "code" with "philosophical logic".
That's the best way I can break it to you, honestly, because it's probably the easiest way for you to get a neutral perspective. I'm genuinely not trying to be biased when I tell you that.
This should legit be a permabannable offense. That is titanically disrespectful of not just your discussion partner, but of good discussion culture as a whole.
You want good discussion? Jesus, I had to wade through that slop which was worse than AI slop.
He would have been fine if he just argued a typical moral anti-realism perspective "actually morality is not needed, and the reason is there's no such thing as truly evil", as that's debatable true in philosophy. I would have been fine with that... but THEN HE LITERALLY SHOOTS HIS OWN ARGUMENT IN THE FACE "but sacrificing kids is actually bad" (as truth-apt), and smugly declares shooting his own argument in the face as winning. I can't even. Except it wasn't a clean anti morality argument in the first place, so I didn't assume as much, except then every time he was clearly losing he retracted back into an anti-moral realism perspective. He could have just stayed there, although I would have expected something more like "it would not be objectively evil if Claude destroyed the world, since objective evil doesn't exist"!
Here's chatgpt's translation into dev speak, since I am an engineer, but I don't think I need to write this myself:
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It’s like a developer insisting, with total confidence, that their system is “provably safe and robust”… and then, the moment they’re challenged, they:
turn off all error handling (try/catch removed because “exceptions are for cowards”),
add assert(false) in the critical path “to prove no one should reach here,”
hardcode if (prod) return true; to bypass the very check they were defending,
ship it, watch it crash instantly,
and declare victory because “the crash shows how seriously we take safety.”
In other words: they didn’t lose the argument because the idea was wrong—they lost because they disabled their own argument’s safety rails and then bragged about the wreck as a feature.
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WTF am I supposed to do there?
I can see why philosophers drink.
Can't recommend letting an LLM write for you directly, though. I found myself skipping your third paragraph in the reply above.
This is exactly, genuinely, 100% what I was talking about when I said you were being direspectful of good discussion culture. You're turning it from high-trust into low-trust and soon nobody will be reading any comment longer than two sentences by default.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717218 and marked it off topic.
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?