Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

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Right, but the only things I have access to are the things I can experience. I am of a slight empiricist bent, so if I am to be convinced about something, it needs to at least be related to those sorts of things I have experienced or can experience.

I can't touch something like a social contract or an ideological standpoint, I don't know where it is are or how long it's been there, when it happened, how intense it is, whether it has any properties, whether it was caused or can cause; these things don't appear to be like anything that in any sense can be said to exist. If these things are gods, then for the sake of this conversation let's call my position an agnostic one.

Society is complex, but even complex things are built from the parts we can see and touch, and since our senses are the only means we have for interacting with the world, even impossibly complex things must somehow be relatable back to them (unless there is some additional channel in which knowledge enters our minds?).

If something is so nebulous that it is completely built from things we can't experience in any way other than being told about them, then how can they be said to exist at all, how could we tell this tale apart from complete fiction?

If you are looking for a proven moral system, there are none. The whole idea of human rights is a product of a certain culture (western europe and its dependencies) just like the Quran or the Bible. You can't really prove something is a human rights, much like you can't prove human rights are the 'correct' moral framework. So it's all opinions really.

> If you are looking for a proven moral system, there are none.

What do you mean by "prove"? You can easily extend your skepticism to any body of knowledge. The empirical sciences ought not be given a free pass merely because of some unexamined (and incoherent) prejudice like scientism.

Everything can be said to be a matter of opinion, so that does nothing to clarify the subject.

This loops back to the question of what we mean when we say a moral statement is true, which is really the heart of what we are investigating.

A moral statement can be said to be true in a certain societal context, but not in absolute. To understand this truth you have to take into account the body of knowledge and collective experience of a certain society. In this case it's pretty much the entire world. If you ignore it, then yeah, the statement doesn't make sense, but it only doesn't make sense if you choose to ignore the most important part of the discussion and all its participants.

The bigger question here is: why does a moral statement can only be valid when it's valid in absolute? Why does it have to have a proof that's easy enough for a person that's willingly choosing to ignore knowledge?

Right, but doesn't that inevitably lead to nihilism? If all value systems are equal, then are any value systems meaningful?

Why do we assert that this-and-that is a human right in such a context?

Why would it lead to nihilism?

I would say that Robert M Pirsig made a pretty good case for objective morality with his Metaphysics of Quality. I had never agreed with the notion before (usually the arguments are religious in nature and require faith to accept) but it is the closest I've ever come to accepting objective morality as brute fact. At the very least it is compelling to indulge in and try out, can't say I've ever looked at things in quite the same way since I first finished Lila.

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