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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

I agree it's an "absurd counterexample". That's the whole point of a reductio ad absurdum. It shows the fallacy at the core of the argument with which you whole heartedly agreed. Precision is important in ethics.

Furthermore, even if I were to be maximally charitable in interpreting the argument as "damaging a person is typically morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is typically worse than physically damaging an object", not everyone would even agree with that, contra your post. I don't think you appreciate how broad ethics is as a topic; virtue ethics and deontological ethics both dispute the premises from which this argument is constructed.

Finally, discrediting an argument you agreed with does not somehow discredit or insult you as a person, so not sure where you got that from.

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Assuming that I'm so stupid as to honestly believe that a papercut is equivalent to burning down a store is absolutely an insult to intelligence.

You'll find that people are more likely to engage with you when you don't treat them like an absolute idiot.

You quoted an ethical principle, then said it was obviously true. Now you're claiming that you don't actually believe in the ethical principle that you claimed was so obviously true?

If you're now claiming that the principle was "true" in some vague unspecified way, but not literally true, then like I said, say what you mean and mean what you say, and don't get bent out of shape when people point out the problems with this sort of imprecise reasoning.

It brings my heart such great joy to know that there are people out there like you who are willing to argue about trivialities that don't actually matter.

Not everything is a deep philosophical discussion that needs to get down to absolute true statements.

Sometimes it's just someone, like me, who is sick of black people being literally murdered by police and thinks it's absurd that white assholes get more worked up over some property than over black lives.

I literally don't give a single shit about absolute ethical principles.

I give a shit about black lives.

Black lives matter, shut the hell up already.

Yeah, who cares about "trivialities" like "my ethical principles are inconsistent or absurd"?

Apparently, all the people who criticize the ethics of the police, the ethics of politicians, the ethics of racist economic policies, and so on. I mean, it's not like consistent ethical principles might go into devising something like a Constitution that recognizes people's natural rights and restricts government from infringing on those rights.

Amazing that you managed to turn this into a partisan attack on "your side" when all that's being discussed is the logical inconsistency of your own stated principles.

Again, if you think "black lives are more valuable than property" is absurd then you really need to think about what that says about you.

Fortunately, no one in this thread said that. Unfortunately, you did say in your very first post that you believed in an absurd ethical principle.

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