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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

What's "ethical" is literally a political and philosophical question. There is no objective answer to that.

This goes against the firm stance of every major religion, and well documented studies showing that humans universally have innate sense of fairness upon which ethical systems are founded. There may be some difficult ethical questions, but there a far more which are very clear-cut.

Human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was commonplace around the world. So how much of a common ethical ground can there be?

There's no universal human instinct to commit human sacrifice, and while it may have happened in scattered groups it wasn't "commonplace."

On the other hand there is absolutely universal human sense of fairness.

It wasn’t “scattered groups.” It was common among the Aztecs, who were the largest population in the new world. It was practiced in Mesopotamia, Iron Age Europe, and other places. That demolishes the idea that there’s a “universal human sense of fairness.”

Of all the hills to die on, this is one of them I guess.

You and I have access to the same LLMs which have been trained on the corpus of scientific research, and they'll tell you the same thing I am. Take it up with [gestures broadly at science].

“Science proves there is universal ethics” is a poster child for “people are treating science like a religion.”

I can't even tell if you're joking, or if this is what AI psychosis looks like.

You brought out a good point, it was.

It's just a statistical anomaly where the collective thought was stuck in a local minima, where they thought that the sacrifices had a correlative/causative effect on good harvest/luck/fertility/rain/etc. The collective common good for a sacrifice of someone was seen as a good deal with the limited information they had available at that time.

This is also true for the right wing. They believe their actions do good.

Religions are inherently political, hell, they are one of the most political things humanity ever had.

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