Telling Right From Wrong | Hacker News Reader

Telling Right From Wrong

nytimes.com

23 pointsJ3L240417 comments

I have heard (but never confirmed for myself) that the term translated as sin into English from the Torah has more of the sense to miss the mark in the original Hebrew.

It appears from this summary this atheist has replaced traditional Western religious-based morality with the very same moral system, sans God.

The hebrew word for sin is חטא ("het"), which shares a root with להחטיא ("to miss the mark"). Hebrew forms start with a 3-letter base[1], which gets put into various templates for conjugations of time, person, active/passive and other nuances. So it seems that you're right there.

[1] modern hebrew also has 4-letter bases and supposedly even a couple of 5-letter ones -- rumour has it that the 5 letter ones never found their way out of a dictionary though.

The word you are looking for is the Greek "hamartia" (αμαρτία) [1]. This does make the biblical association you're trying to set up significantly less tenable.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamartia

Well, the hebrew word: Torah, means "instruction" (תּוֹרָה). So I guess that means if you forget the instruction, you are certainly missing the mark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah

The link doesn't work for me, but this does: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/26/magazine/2010l...

This is still a distinctly minority view among moral philosophers. I believe (I can't find the survey at the moment) that most think the is-ought gap is fundamental.

That's not completely true. You have to separate universal moral framework from a relativist system. In this case is-ought doesn't come in to play (as Hume himself acknowledged in the answer to the question of induction). I'm more focused in epistemology myself but I also happen to be a Hume nut.

Maybe you can educate me here. Once you've crossed the relativist bridge, doesn't the study of morality just become anthropology, not philosophy?

Sure. Nietzsche was one of the first to approach this subject. In "The Gay Science" he built out the ethical self-actualization as a rejection of nihilism. Later existentialists (Camus, Sarte) did the same thing but attempted to connect it on a more human basis with freedom. Some even approached the same question with a theological perspective (Kierkegaard). The phenomenologists wanted us to throw everything we thought we knew about existence and morality out the window, so I'm not even going to touch on Hiedegger et al (if you're interested you can slave your way through Zein und Seit yourself). The Neo-Kantians endeavor to correct the mistakes Kant made following the CI and deal more with a "personal" CI, if you will (quite complicated, can't explain in a few sentences).

Overall, I think that's a pretty good reading list to start with. You should probably read this[1] as an introduction, as well as [2]. Remember though: philosophy almost never comes up with correct answers, it only shows which answers are almost definitely wrong.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/ [2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/

Building a plausible a-religious moral philosophy always reminded me of building a plausible perpetual motion machine.

How can you conceal the fact that you're trying to extract a conclusion from a system that doesn't have a premise? Well, there are indeed lots of methods of misdirection.

The last try at building a perpetual motion machine that I remember involved claiming to have a device for "amplifying power" but not being able to hook the device to itself "somehow". Made the system harder to disprove.

A religious basis doesn't make a moral philosophy any more reasonable (you can't argue real divine inspiration without proof). I am not sure if you even intended to imply that, of course.

A "scientific" moral philosophy is still rooted in some fundamental non-objective rule, of course, but that's not necessarily a bad thing nor does it affect its plausibility.

One fundamental is that humans are separated from other animals[1] not just by self-awareness but also awareness of others — and the resulting effect of empathy. With this information, it can be argued that this ability bestows an obligation to care for others. A consistent moral philosophy can be built from that and other observations.

[1] This could apply to equal or lesser degree to some other species but we have no way of verifying it currently.

Building a moral system from premises always reminded me of Data in star trek trying to understand emotions logically. It just doesn't work that way. Every culture has a system of morality, even apes have a strong sense of fairness. And one would have to be very ignorant of the bible (or any religious text i've seen) to think morals come from it.

Ick. Sounds like you need to read a bit more about epistemology. After you have torn everything apart you get a more solid grasp of how to build some semblance of a system up again.

Here's my suggested reading list: Plato to establish a foundation, Descartes's First Meditation (edit: or the skeptics, but I don't really feel the need to subject non-philosophy students to that) to tear it down, Kant to give you a more rounded view (but be careful to note where Kant fails as well), Hume to bring reasonableness into being, Nietzsche to round out the pitfalls of nihilism, and some Neo-Kantianism, evolutionary psychology, and modern ethics to round it out.

I don't see why a secular moral philosophy is necessarily any more lacking in a premise than a religious one. Unless we're defining "areligious" to mean "without a premise," in which case I suppose it is tautological.

Religion is a subset of metaphysics. Ethics is a subset of metaphysics. Neither is a subset of the other. I don't understand your objection to ethical claims unfounded in religion.

> Building a plausible a-religious moral philosophy...

You should definitely read Anathem by Neal Stephenson! He does exactly that, and a lot of other things.

right: ->

wrong: 1=2

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