Comment by skissane
6 hours ago
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.
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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.
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You can find many ancient cultures who tortured babies for sport when they captured them in raids.
Exposure and infanticide was also very common in many places.
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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)
> vaccinating babies torture
it's irrelevant for this discussion, as it's not for sport but other purpose
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".
Yes!
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.
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The fact that there are a ton of replies trying to argue against this says a lot about HN.
Contrarianism can become a vice if taken too far.
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.
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.
I doubt it's "universal". Do coyotes and orcas follow this rule?
> Do not torture babies for sport
There are millions of people who consider abortion murder of babies and millions who don't. This is not settled at all.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
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.
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...
> 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
Strong disagree.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
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> I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do...
slow clap