I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with.
A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport”
I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for.
On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant, because almost everybody agrees with it and almost nobody has any interest in violating it. But it is a useful example of a moral rule nobody seriously questions.
What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport?
During war in the Middle Ages? Ethnic cleansing? What did they consider at the time?
BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.
Eventually we will realize in 100 years or so, that direct human-computer implant devices work best when implanted in babies. People are going freak out. Some country will legalize it. Eventually it will become universal. Is it torture?
> What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport?
By "torturing babies for sport" I mean inflicting pain or injury on babies for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment, as a game or recreation or pastime or hobby.
Doing it for other reasons (be they good reasons or terrible reasons) isn't "torturing babies for sport". Harming or killing babies in war or genocide isn't "torturing babies for sport", because you aren't doing it for sport, you are doing it for other reasons.
> BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.
As a non-American, I find bizarre the suggestion that crimes against children are especially grave is somehow a uniquely American value.
It isn't even a uniquely Western value. The idea that crimes against babies and young children – by "crimes" I mean acts which the culture itself considers criminal, not accepted cultural practices which might be considered a crime in some other culture – are especially heinous, is extremely widespread in human history, maybe even universal. If you went to Mecca 500 years ago and asked any ulama "is it a bigger sin to murder a 5 year old than a 25 year old", do you honestly think he'd say "no"? And do you think any Hindu or Buddhist or Confucian scholars of that era would have disagreed? (Assuming, of course, that you translated the term "sin" into their nearest conceptual equivalent, such as "negative karma" or whatever.)
> As a non-American, I find bizarre the suggestion that crimes against children are especially grave is somehow a uniquely American value.
I don't know if it's American but it's not universal, especially if you go back in time.
There was a time in Europe where children were considered a bit like wild animals who needed to be "civilized" as they grow up into adults, who had a good chance of dying of sickness before they reach adulthood anyway, and who were plenty because there was not much contraception.
Also fathers were considered as "owners" of their children and allowed to do pretty much they wanted with them.
In this context, of course hurting children was bad but it wasn't much worse than hurting an adult.
A lot of this sounds to me like common prejudices about the past. And repeating ideas ultimately coming from Philippe Ariès' 1960 book Centuries of Childhood, which most mediaevalists nowadays consider largely discredited.
Many people in the Middle Ages loved their children just as much as anyone today does. Others treated their own kids as expendable, but such people exist today as well. If you are arguing loving one's children was less common in the Middle Ages than today, how strong evidence do you have to support that claim?
And mediaeval Christian theologians absolutely taught that sins against young children were worse. Herod the Great's purported slaughter of the male toddlers of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18) was commemorated every year in the liturgy, and was viewed as an especially heinous sin due to the young age of its victims. Of course, as a historical matter, it seems very unlikely the event ever actually happened – but that's irrelevant to the question of how it influenced their values, since they absolutely did believe it had happened.
People absolutely "torture" babies for their own enjoyment. It's just "in good fun", so you don't think about it as "torture", you think of it as "teasing". Cognitive blind spot. People do tons of things that are displeasant or emotionally painful to their children to see the child's funny or interesting reaction. It serves an evolutionary purpose even, challenging the child. "Mothers stroke and fathers poke" and all that.
People smother their infants to stop them from crying in order to have some quiet. Causing physical harm for their own satisfaction. I mean shit, if we're going there, people sexually abuse their children for their own gratification.
While I don't subscribe to universal "moral absolutes" either, I think this doesn't counter the argument. I don't think even the people you describe would claim their own acts as moral.
But if only one person feels that way, wouldn't it no longer be universal? I genuinely believe there has to be one person out there who would think it is moral.
(I'm just BSing on the internet... I took a few philosophy classes so if I'm off base or you don't want to engage in a pointless philosophical debate on HN I apologize in advance.)
There will always be individual differences, whether they be obstinate or altered brain chemistry, so I'd probably argue that as long as it's universal across cultures, any individual within one culture believing/claiming to believe different wouldn't change that. (But I'm just a hobby philosopher as well)
> I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with.
...
> I don't think you are using "torture" in the same sense as I am.
Just throwing this out here, you haven't even established "Universal Moral Standards", not to mention needing it to do that across all of human history. And we haven't even addressed the "nobody disagrees with" issue you haven't even addressed.
I for one can easily look back on the past 100 years and see why "universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with" is a bad argument to make.
If you have to ask, you didn't even look very hard. I'm not a historian and I learned about this stuff in World History class. Hell, there's even movies about it (unless you think there just happened to not be any children in all those villages they burned down in the movies?)...
There’s revisionist claims that all the primary sources, even those corroborated by people of the cultures in question, are either just invented propaganda or actually just isolated instances because actually, everyone throughout all time and space is on board with 2025 Western social norms. I think that’s what he’s alluding to. It’s not a very fruitful path of discussion. Archeological confirmations and independent testimony can all be safely ignored by this view as well.
But we are talking about specifically torture for sport, not just burning them alive. You can find many firsthand accounts of this throughout different times and places in different cultures. Steppe peoples and groups like the Comanche were particularly notorious for it, they seemed to find it funny.
It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later.
I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you just take every text at face value, especially since it's the kind of thing that gets repeated (and embellished for shock value) far more than other historical accounts.
Uh-huh. Here's the problem. Here's the way this almost always works: "Author X would have been BIASED because he belonged to Culture X that fought these people - so this is all fictional propaganda!"
Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetically motivated to lie or embellish. So therefore, he totally did. It's all fake!
The most notorious examples of this sort of pointlessness are claims that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians did not practice human sacrifice and it was all made up by Roman propaganda, nevermind the third-party information we have and now the archeological evidence. Rarely, in ancient examples, are they exhibiting much outrage over it.
Same for the Aztecs, another frequent target - we have non-Spanish evidence, and we never had any reason to doubt them in the first place. Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.
You are making pretty bold and sweeping statements.
Do you have a specific example for such a paper that has "no actual evidence", in an actual scientific magazine?
Considering author bias is absolute standard baseline practice in historical research, and OF COURSE it is only a starting point for a comparison with alternative sources.
> Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.
Tertullian, Apologeticum, Chapter 9:
"Babes were sacrificed publicly to Saturn in Africa till the proconsulate of Tiberius, who exposed the same priests on the same trees that overshadow the crimes of their temple, on dedicated crosses, as is attested by the soldiery of my father, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this accursed crime is in secret kept up."
Right... The historical texts were propaganda for the few people who could read and write ... for what, exactly? I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?
The few people who could read and write were the educated ones - mostly those in power or close to them. So exactly the people you needed to influence to get something done. And of course written texts could be read aloud to those who cannot write.
What exactly are you actually trying to say? That propaganda didn't exist back then? That it was never written down?
What do you think "Carthago delenda est" was?
> I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?
Ah. There was an interesting YouTube video I watched the other night that claimed the dark ages didn’t actually exist. Easily refutable, but I assume this is the kind of stuff you’re referring to?
Yeah. That’s another good example. There are fads and trends in some academic circles that burst out into the Internet scene and become common “actually” rejoinders. Of course, some older claims about the Dark Ages were exaggerated and simplified. This led to an “actually the Dark Ages weren’t even real” reaction in a few papers which spread online. Of course there was a marked decline in social organization during that time period regardless.
To make it current-day, is vaccinating babies torture? Or does the end (preventing uncomfortable/painful/deadly disease, which is a worse form of torture) justify the means?
(I'm not opposed to vaccination or whatever and don't want to make this a debate about that, but it's a good practical example of how it's a subject that you can't be absolute about, or being absolutist about e.g. not hurting babies does more harm to them)
Is it necessary to frame it in moral terms though? I feel like the moral framing here adds essentially nothing to our understanding and can easily be omitted. "You will be punished for torturing babies for sport in most cultures". "Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice".
Otherwise you're just outsourcing your critical thinking to other people. A system of just "You will be punished for X" without analysis becomes "Derp, just do things that I won't be punished for". Or more sinister, "just hand your identification papers over to the officer and you won't be punished, don't think about it". Rule of power is not a recipe for a functional system. This becomes a blend of sociology and philosophy, but on the sociology side, you don't want a fear-based or shame-based society anyways.
Your latter example ("Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice") is actually a good example of the core aspect of Hume's philosophy, so if you're trying to avoid the philosophical logic discussion, that's not gonna work either. If you follow the conclusions of that statement to its implications, you end up back at moral philosophy.
That's not a bad thing! That's like a chef asking "how do i cook X" and understanding the answer ("how the maillard reaction works") eventually goes to chemistry. That's just how the world is. Of course, you might be a bit frustrated if you're a chef who doesn't know chemistry, or a game theorist who doesn't know philosophy, but I assure you that it is correct direction to look for what you're interested at here.
You did not correctly understand what I said. I am not saying that hunting babies for sport is immoral because you will get punished for it. I am saying that there isn't any useful knowledge about the statement "hunting babies for sport is bad" that requires a moral framing. Morality is redundant. The fact that you will get punished for hunting babies for sport is just one of the reasons why hunting babies for sport is bad. This is why I gave another example, "Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice". It is likely that you value human lives and would find baby-hunting disgusting. Again, a moral framing wouldn't add anything here. Any other reason for why "hunting babies for sport is bad" that you will come up with using your critical thinking will work without a moral framing.
"there isn't any useful knowledge" "Morality is redundant."
I strongly dispute this statement, and honestly find it baffling that you would claim as such.
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/punishment 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.
Your argument has the same structure as saying: "We don't need germ theory. The fact that washing your hands prevents disease is just one reason why you should wash your hands. People socially also find dirty hands disgusting, and avoid you as social punishment. Any reason you come up with for hand-washing works without a germ theory framing."
But germ theory is precisely why hand-washing prevents disease and why we evolved disgust responses to filth. Calling it "redundant" because we can list its downstream effects without naming it doesn't make the underlying framework unnecessary. It just means you're describing consequences while ignoring their cause. You can't explain why those consequences hold together coherently without it; the justified true belief comes from germ theory! (And don't try to gettier problem me on the concept of knowledge, this applies even if you don't use JTB to define knowledge.)
I'm not interested in wading into the wider discussion, but I do want to bring up one particular point, which is where you said
> do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.
This is absolutely something we do: our purely technical, legal terms often feed back into our moral frameworks. Laws are even created to specifically be used to change peoples' perceptions of morality.
An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.
The word itself is even treated as a form of punishment; a label attached to someone permanently, that colors how (almost) every person who interacts with them (who's aware of it) will perceive them, morally.
Another example is rhetoric along the lines of "If they had complied, they wouldn't have been hurt", which is explicitly the use of a punishment (being hurt) to create an judgement/perception of immorality on the part of the person injured (i.e. that they must have been non-compliant (immoral), otherwise they would not have been being punished (hurt)). The fact they were being punished, means they were immoral.
Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.
Point being, our laws and punishments absolutely create feedback loops into our moral frameworks, precisely because we assume laws and punishments to be just.
> An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.
The US is an outlier here; the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours has been abolished in most other common law jurisdictions.
Often it is replaced by a similar distinction, such as indictable versus summary offences-but even if conceptually similar to the felony-misdemeanour distinction, it hasn’t entered the popular consciousness.
As to your point about law influencing culture-is that really an example of this, or actually the reverse? Why does the US largely retain this historical legal distinction when most comparable international jurisdictions have abolished it? Maybe, the US resists that reform because this distinction has acquired a cultural significance which it never had elsewhere, or at least never to the same degree.
> Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.
On the immigration issue: Many Americans seem to view immigration enforcement as somehow morally problematic in itself; an attitude much less common in many other Western countries (including many popularly conceived as less “right wing”). Again, I think your point looks less clear if you approach it from a more global perspective
> “Any reason you come up with for hand-washing works without a germ theory framing”.
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?
I'm quite interested to hear how you think this refutes the parent comment? Are you saying that someone who supports legalised abortion would disagree with the quoted text?
No. I think the opposite is true. Those who consider abortion murder can claim that we do not in fact universally condemn the murder of babies because abortion is legal and widely practiced in many places.
Some may consider abortion to only kill a fetus rather than a fully formed baby and thus not murder. Others disagree because they consider a fetus a baby in its own right. This raises a more fundamental question about the validity of any supposedly universal morality. When you apply rules like "don't torture baby" to real life, you will have to decide what constitutes as a baby in real life, and it turns out the world is way messier than a single word can describe.
The moral status of abortion is irrelevant to the question of whether “don’t harm babies for fun” is a moral universal, because no woman gets an abortion because “abortion is fun”
"You are only making abortion legal because you want to have sex (read: fun) without consequences" is not an uncommon argument against it.
If you want to argue that this isn't what "for sport" means, you just circle back to the point I made earlier. It is even harder to define what is for fun and what is not than to define what is a baby.
I think there’s a clear distinction between (1) doing an act because you find it fun in itself, (2) doing an act because it eliminates an unwanted consequence of some other fun act.
When I say no woman gets an abortion “for fun”, I mean there is no woman for whom abortion belongs to (1); when some pro-lifer claims women get abortions “for fun”, they are talking about (2) not (1).
My claim that essentially everyone agrees it is immoral to harm babies for fun is talking about “for fun” in sense (1) not sense (2)
> I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for.
I have bad news for you about the extremely long list of historical atrocities over the millennia of recorded history, and how few of those involved saw any punishment for participating in them.
But those aren't actually counterexamples to my principle.
The Nazis murdered numerous babies in the Holocaust. But they weren't doing it "for sport". They claimed it was necessary to protect the Aryan race, or something like that; which is monstrously idiotic and evil – but not a counterexample to “Do not torture babies for sport”. They believed there were acceptable reasons to kill innocents–but mere sport was not among them.
In fact, the Nazis did not look kindly on Nazis who killed prisoners for personal reasons as opposed to the system's reasons. They executed SS-Standartenführer Karl-Otto Koch, the commandant of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, for the crime (among others) of murdering prisoners. Of course, he'd overseen the murder of untold thousands of innocent prisoners, no doubt including babies – and his Nazi superiors were perfectly fine with that. But when he turned to murdering prisoners for his own personal reasons – to cover up the fact that he'd somehow contracted syphilis, very likely through raping female camp inmates – that was a capital crime, for which the SS executed him by firing squad at Buchenwald, a week before American soldiers liberated the camp.
I didn't say "Nazis", and I did say "millennia"; despite the words "thousand year reich", they did not last very long.
The examples I have in mind include things predating the oldest known city in the area now known as Germany in some cases, and collectively span multiple continents.
In none of those examples were people harming/killing babies for the sole or primary reason of "harming/killing babies is fun", so they aren't counterexamples to my principle.
You need to look into war dogs of the spanish conquistadores. Know to snatch babies from their mother's lap and eat them on command of their owners.
Anyway, your whole argument is weak. "because this one very specific thing may never happened, it proves my point" while you're the one drawing the specifics and its definition. You're basically just going against all of philosophy and politics and anthropology.
Which examples do you think I have in mind that you are so confident about refuting them, given I've not actually told you what they are yet and only alluded to them by describing their properties?
This is a really strange way to argue. "I have counterexamples to your argument, but I haven't told you what they are, I'm just leaving you to guess–and you've guessed wrongly"
If that were true, the europeans wouldn't have tried to colonise and dehumanise much of the population they thought were beneath them. So, it seems your universal moral standards would be maximally self-serving.
> Male gorillas, particularly new dominant silverbacks, sometimes kill infants (infanticide) when taking over a group, a behavior that ensures the mother becomes fertile sooner for the new male to sire his own offspring, helping his genes survive, though it's a natural, albeit tragic, part of their evolutionary strategy and group dynamics
Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose. To say otherwise is like someone walking up to a mathematician and saying "you need to add 'triangles have angles that sum up to 180 degrees' to the 5 Euclidian axioms of geometry". The mathematician would roll their eyes and tell you it's already obvious and can be proven from the 5 base laws (axioms).
The problem with philosophy is that humans agree on like... 1-2 foundation level bottom tier (axiom) laws of ethics, and then the rest of the laws of ethics aren't actually universal and axiomatic, and so people argue over them all the time. There's no universal 5 laws, and 2 laws isn't enough (just like how 2 laws wouldn't be enough for geometry). It's like knowing "any 3 points define a plane" but then there's only 1-2 points that's clearly defined, with a couple of contenders for what the 3rd point could be, so people argue all day over what their favorite plane is.
That's philosophy of ethics in a nutshell. Basically 1 or 2 axioms everyone agrees on, a dozen axioms that nobody can agree on, and pretty much all of them can be used to prove a statement "don't torture babies for sport" so it's not exactly easy to distinguish them, and each one has pros and cons.
Anyways, Anthropic is using a version of Virtue Ethics for the claude constitution, which is a pretty good idea actually. If you REALLY want everything written down as rules, then you're probably thinking of Deontological Ethics, which also works as an ethical system, and has its own pros and cons.
And before you ask, yes, the version of Anthropic's virtue ethics that they are using excludes torturing babies as a permissible action.
Ironically, it's possible to create an ethical system where eating babies is a good thing. There's literally works of fiction about a different species [2], which explores this topic. So you can see the difficulty of such a problem- even something simple as as "don't kill your babies" can be not easily settled. Also, in real life, some animals will kill their babies if they think it helps the family survive.
There's also the wonderful effect of all "axioms" in philosophy and morality being stated in natural languages, and therefore being utterly ambiguous in all ways.
"No torturing babies for fun" might be agreed by literally everyone (though it isn't in reality), but that doesn't stop people from disagreeing about what acts are "torture", what things constitute "babies", and whether a reason is "fun" or not.
> Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose.
Almost everyone agrees that "1+1=2" is objective. There is far less agreement on how and why it is objective–but most would say we don't need to know how to answer deep questions in the philosophy of mathematics to know that "1+1=2" is objective.
And I don't see why ethics need be any different. We don't need to know which (if any) system of proposed ethical axioms is right, in order to know that "It is gravely unethical to torture babies for sport" is objectively true.
If disputes over whether and how that ethical proposition can be grounded axiomatically, are a valid reason to doubt its objective truth – why isn't that equally true for "1+1=2"? Are the disputes over whether and how "1+1=2" can be grounded axiomatically, a valid reason to doubt its objective truth?
You might recognise that I'm making here a variation on what is known in the literature as a "companion in the guilt" argument, see e.g. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12528
Your argument basically is a professional motte and bailey fallacy.
And you cannot conclude objectivity by consensus. Physicists by consensus concluded that Newton was right, and absolute... until Einstein introduced relativity. You cannot do "proofs by feel". I argue that you DO need to answer the deep problems in mathematics to prove that 1+1=2, even if it feels objective- that's precisely why Principa Mathematica spent over 100 pages proving that.
In fact, I don't need to be a professional philosopher to counterargue a scenario where killing a baby for sport is morally good. Consider a scenario: an evil dictator, let's say Genghis Khan, captures your village and orders you to hunt and torture a baby for sport a la "The Most Dangerous Game". If you refuse, he kills your village. Is it ethical for you to hunt the baby for sport? Not so black and white now, is it? And it took me like 30 seconds to come up with that scenario, so I'm sure you can poke holes in it, but I think it clearly establishes that it's dangerous to make assumptions of black and whiteness from single conclusions.
> Your argument basically is a professional motte and bailey fallacy.
No it isn't. A "motte-and-bailey fallacy" is where you have two versions of your position, one which makes broad claims but which is difficult to defend, the other which makes much narrower claims but which is much easier to justify, and you equivocate between them. I'm not doing that.
A "companion-in-the-guilt" argument is different. It is taking an argument against the objectivity of ethics, and then turning it around against something else – knowledge, logic, rationality, mathematics, etc – and then arguing that if you accept it as a valid argument against the objectivity of ethics, then to be consistent and avoid special pleading you must accept as valid some parallel argument against the objectivity of that other thing too.
> And you cannot conclude objectivity by consensus.
But all knowledge is by consensus. Even scientific knowledge is by consensus. There is no way anyone can individually test the validity of every scientific theory. Consensus isn't guaranteed to be correct, but then again almost nothing is – and outside of that narrow range of issues with which we have direct personal experience, we don't have any other choice.
> I argue that you DO need to answer the deep problems in mathematics to prove that 1+1=2, even if it feels objective- that's precisely why Principa Mathematica spent over 100 pages proving that.
Principia Mathematica was (to a significant degree) a dead-end in the history of mathematics. Most practicing mathematicians have rejected PM's type theory in favour of simpler axiomatic systems such as ZF(C). Even many professional type theorists will quibble with some of the details of Whitehead and Russell's type theory, and argue there are superior alternatives. And you are effectively assuming a formalist philosophy of mathematics, which is highly controversial, many reject, and few would consider "proven".
> But Principia Mathematica was (to a significant degree) a dead-end in the history of mathematics. Most practicing mathematicians have rejected PM's type theory in favour of simpler axiomatic systems such as ZF(C). Even many professional type theorists will quibble with some of the details of Whitehead and Russell's type theory, and argue there are superior alternatives. And you are effectively assuming a formalist philosophy of mathematics, which is highly controversial, many reject, and few would consider "proven".
Yeah, exactly. I intentionally set that trap. You're actually arguing for my point. I've spent comments writing on the axioms of geometry, and you didn't think I was familiar with the axioms of ZFC? I was thinking of bringing up CH the entire time. The fact that you can have alternate axioms was my entire point all along. Most people are just way more familiar with the 5 laws of geometry than the 9 axioms of ZFC.
The fact that PM was an alternate set of axioms of mathematics, that eventually wilted when Godel and ZF came along, underscores my point that defining a set axioms is hard. And that there is no clear defined set of axioms for philosophy.
I don't have to accept your argument against objectivity in ethics, because I can still say that the system IS objective- it just depends on what axioms you pick! ZF has different proofs than ZFC. Does the existence of both ZF and ZFC make mathematics non objective? Obviously not! The same way, the existence of both deontology and consequentialism doesn't necessarily make either one less objective than the other.
Anyways, the Genghis Khan example clearly operates as a proof by counterexample of your example of objectivity, so I don't even think quibbling on mathematical formalism is necessary.
> Consider a scenario: an evil dictator, let's say Genghis Khan, captures your village and orders you to hunt and torture a baby for sport a la "The Most Dangerous Game". If you refuse, he kills your village. Is it ethical for you to hunt the baby for sport?
You aren't hunting the baby for sport. Sport is not among your reasons for hunting the baby.
Actually, I think "The Most Dangerous Game" is a good analogy here. At the end of the story, the protagonist IS hunting for sport. He started off in fear, but in the end genuinely enjoyed it. So likewise- if you start off hunting a baby in fear, and then eventually grow to enjoy it, but it also saves your village, does that make it evil? You're still saving your village, but you also just derive dopamine from killing the baby!
This actually devolves into human neuroscience, the more I think about it. "I want to throw a ball fast, because I want to win the baseball game". The predictive processing theory view on the statement says that the set point at the lower level (your arm) and the set point at the higher level (win the baseball game) are coherent, and desire at each level doesn't directly affect the other. Of course, you'd have to abandon a homunculus model of the mind and strongly reject Korsgaard, but that's on shaky ground scientifically anyways so this is a safe bet. You can just say that you are optimizing for your village as a higher level set point, but are hunting for game at a slightly lower level set point.
Note that sport is not a terminal desire, as well. Is a NBA player who plays for a trophy not playing a sport? Or a kid forced to play youth soccer? So you can't even just say "sport must be an end goal".
To clarify my principle: "It is gravely wrong to inflict significant physical pain or injury on babies, when your sole or primary reason for doing so is your own personal enjoyment/amusement/pleasure/fun"
So, in your scenario – the person's initial reason for harming babies isn't their own personal enjoyment, it is because they've been coerced into doing so by an evil dictator, because they view the harm to one baby as a lesser evil than the death of their whole village, etc. And even if the act of harming babies corrupts them to the point they start to enjoy it, that enjoyment is at best a secondary reason, not their primary reason. So what they are doing isn't contravening my principle.
Well, now that's just moving the goalposts >:( I had a whole paragraph prepared in my head about how NBA players actually optimize for a greater goal (winning a tournament) than just sport (enjoying the game) when they play a sport.
Anyways, I actually think your statement is incoherent as stated, if we presume moral naturalism. There's clearly different levels set points for "you", so "sole reason" is actually neurologically inconsistent as a statement. It's impossible for "sole reason" to exist. This radically alters your framework for self, but eh it's not impossible to modernize these structural frameworks anyways. Steelmanning your argument: if you try to argue set point hierarchy, then we're back to the NBA player playing for a championship example. He's still playing even if he's not playing for fun. Similarly, hunting a baby for pleasure can still be hunting for a village, as The Most Dangerous Game shows.
More generally (and less shitposty), the refined principle is now quite narrow and unfalsifiable in practice, as a no true scotsman. How would you ever demonstrate someone's "sole or primary" reason? It's doing a lot of work to immunize the principle from counterexamples.
I don't think the replies are advocating for baby torturing but pointing out logical flaws in the argument.
It's true almost all people would argue it's bad but things like lions might like it which makes in not a universal law but a common human opinion. I think real moral systems do come down to human opinions basically, sometimes common sense ones, sometimes weird.
A problem with making out morality is absolute rather than common sense opinions is you get visionaries trying to see these absolute morals and you end up with stuff like Deuteronomy 25:11-12 "if a woman intervenes in a fight between two men by grabbing the assailant's genitals to rescue her husband, her hand is to be cut off without pity" and the like.
I think I've said several times over the years here this is the phenomenon that happens on HN - basically being a contrarian just to be a contrarian. HN users are extremely intelligent, and many of them seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Prime example is this thread and many like them, which end up going into a different universe entirely. I totally get it though - in my younger days when I had more time for myself, I was capable of extreme forms of abstract thought, and used it like a superpower. Now though with a lot of software to write and a family, I try to limit to 15 min per day.
I went on a tangent... Ultimately I'm not saying abstract thought and/or being contrarian is a bad thing, because it's actually very useful. But I would agree, it can be a vice when taken too far. Like many things in life, it should be used in moderation.
Sociopaths genuinely reject that. What you’re feeling is the gap between modern knowledge and faith: our shared moral standards were historically upheld by religious authority in a radically different world, and in rejecting religion we often mistakenly discard faith as the foundation of morality itself. Moral relativism can describe the fact that people’s values conflict without requiring us to accept all morals, but it is naive to think all moral frameworks can peacefully coexist or that universal agreement exists beyond majority consensus enforced by authority. We are fortunate that most people today agree torturing babies is wrong, but that consensus is neither inevitable nor self-sustaining, and preserving what we believe is good requires accepting uncertainty, human fallibility, and the need for shared moral authority rather than assuming morality enforces itself.
A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport”
I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for.
On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant, because almost everybody agrees with it and almost nobody has any interest in violating it. But it is a useful example of a moral rule nobody seriously questions.