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Comment by avanti | Hacker News Reader

Let's talk about the current topic. I agree that if people are suffering, then it's probably wrong (I say "probably" because some people need to endure "suffering" to improve the overall happiness of other people. Think about Psychiatric hospital). But our knowledge of the suffering is from media, and media can present biased view for whatever reason. And we decide to believe in that media because we share some value with it. So seeing this news from BBC and immediately draws conclusion seems quite rash to me. The story between Uyghurs and Han Chinese is a complicated one. It dates back thousands of years. And there's human thinking fallacy involved here (I mentioned it in another reply).

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Based on the footage, and even in spite of the agenda made clear from the interviewer's line of questions, it seems difficult to deny many aspects of the BBC reporting. These institutions do exist, and are targeted at the Uyghur minority. My current internal bias suggests that enrollees at these institutions would be punished for expressing anything but positivity regarding their situation. When one group of humans has power over another, history and even academic exercises [1] suggest that things get ugly.

Much of the western world is influenced by Kantian ethics [2], of which a central tenant is that the end (potentially greater societal stability, in this case) is not justified by the means. This system of thought does not seem to hold much sway by the CCP, and I believe many disagreements can be traced back to this point.

[1] Google "Stanford Prison Experiment" [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantian_ethics

I totally agree with you on this. All the disagreements comes from ideology. And the imbalance of power causes the abuse of power. The CCP uses its monopoly to maintain its control over the country. But why end is not justified by the means? How would Kant solve the trolley problem? If CCP's forcing "education" is wrong, what about forcing the Kantian ethics on CCP? Who actually is abusing power?

I don't think anyone is forcing Kantian ethics on the CCP. If they are, it's not working very well. :)

But I'm glad we can trace some disagreements regarding whether specific actions are ethical back to differing ideologies. If we can abstract some of these ideas it should be easier to have conversations that are a bit removed from emotional factors.

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