Hacker News Reader

Comment by blintz | Hacker News Reader

> Almost all of Asia and Africa accepts that requiring conformity in voluntary lifestyle and personal expression is legitimate.

Everyone has a right to not be executed or go to jail for their sexual orientation or gender identity. This is sadly not the case in many countries.

The sand trap of moral relativism is not the point - people in the 'west' are making the normative claim that this is a fundamental human right.

New information about possible genetic determinants of sexual orientation (or lack thereof) is not fundamental to determining if this is in the "realm of human rights". What is key is: people who are LGBT emphatically cannot choose to 'convert' to some other sexual orientation or gender identity. Thus, any private or public policy that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is wrong.

View on HN

You and I agree it’s a human right, and the reason why. I said its a human right because it's a "characteristic that cannot easily be changed." You said it's because "people who are LGBT emphatically cannot choose to 'convert' to some other sexual orientation or gender identity."

If there's a difference between that phraseology, I don't mean it to be substantive--I agree with what you said. It's OP who rejects that premise.

Even if it were an easily changeable characteristic, we should consider it wrong for any society to threaten harm or punishment or ostracization for this. That the characteristic is or isn’t easily changed is not relevant.

It’s not a question of moral relativism. You’d have to argue that any behavior is a crime in order for it to be legitimate for perpetrators to suffer consequences. Otherwise, it is wrong that someone should suffer consequences, all else equal.

I like nachos. Tomorrow I might not like nachos. It is wrong in any society if my liking or disliking of nachos results in me being killed, bullied, shamed, etc. Any society that claims a right of legitimacy to impose social norms in this way on the liking or disliking of nachos is a morally wrong society. There’s no debate about this. You can either argue convincingly that nacho preference is a crime, or else any attempt to treat it like a crime is wrong.

Assuming that there are some actions that it is morally just to punish, if not the individual's ability to exert free will to avoid them, then what (in your mind) sets apart those actions from those that it is not morally just to punish?

Or are you making the claim that it is never morally justified for any action to be punished?

>Or are you making the claim that it is never morally justified for any action to be punished? I'm sorry, but are you terminally stupid? Of course they didn't make that claim, that's why the choose the example of Nachos.

> You’d have to argue that any behavior is a crime in order for it to be legitimate for perpetrators to suffer consequences.

Okay, but there was a time when homosexuality was a crime in the majority of Western countries, and in some places around the world, it still is a crime. What then/there?

Moral reasoning based on current law is partially circular reasoning, and also tends to ossify current law/state of moral progress.

> Okay, but there was a time when homosexuality was a crime in the majority of Western countries, and in some places around the world, it still is a crime. What then/there?

One easy place to start-- are the laws are based on kinds of dubious claims that our own social and scientific history has rejected?

And at least in Africa, Western evangelicals have spent a lot of time and effort exporting their same stupid ideas about homosexuality. So our Western approaches should be pretty easy to copy-paste there. :)

I'm mostly on your side. I agree that choice or not, it should not matter.

But, if I wanted to try to push back, ... your nachos require cheese. Cheese requires cows. Raising of cows are a major source of greenhouse gas etc... Therefore you should not be allowed to eat nachos as it's bad for society at large and you should be forced to stop eating them. (substitute beef or whale meat or whatever it takes to see the point).

Here we're getting into another weird issue where you say "we should consider it wrong"

Why should we consider the moral choices of a culture to which we do not belong wrong? What benefit comes to the people affected, or to us through this mental finger wag?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com