Hacker News Reader

Ethics are subjective. In the culture he described this seems like it was no only ethical, but praiseworthy. Ethics are not universal and neither are principles. I think he turned out alright, but that is my opinion.

View on HN

Fundamental ethics are not subjective. Is murder subjective? A live human disappears from existence by force, how is that subjective? Now, murder something of that live person, say, make him handicapped by force. Is that subjective? You will now claim that it is subjective, because the person is at least alive. No. It is still not subjective. Now, take it further down the food chain. Steal something from a person. Bully him. Curse him. Make his life miserable. All subjective? Nothing is subjective here. The fundamental ethics filters down to the common ethics. If one is subjective, they are all subjective. But you will be hard pressed to prove a murder to be subjective. So, none of the ethics are subjective.

Ethics are not subjective. People merely disagree on what the right ones are.

There is some optimal set of ethics which, if consistently followed, will lead to an optimal set of outcomes. We're not clever enough to figure them out, though, and so people will quite happily come up with their own, inevitably self-serving ethical systems in which "the things I want to do are right, the things you want to do are wrong".

Getting everyone to behave perfectly ethically is impossible, but telling everyone that their own self-serving ethical systems are perfectly valid is one of the worst things you can do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com