Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I think you meant "antidote" instead of anecdote?

Nice post, thanks for writing. It's interesting how we don't then focus (at least in the now secular West) on ways for morality to be seeped into our collective consciousness. The answer historically has always been religion (at least in the last few millenia) but today people get all jumpy when even trying to talk about it.



Yeah, antidote. I can't believe how sloppy my writing is these days.

I'm not sure how religion plays into things. You can see on the thread a very strong example of how modernism still dominates a lot of our thinking. We want to be able to place 'moral issues' into rational epistemological frameworks or political theories. I have the same instincts. Does game theory work here? Can we tweak & changing the legal definition of corporations or encouraging limited partnerships to avoid this or that pathology?

You're right that even talking about morality feels religious. I think its a mistake to avoid dealing with morality as an independent thing. These attempts to get morality from amorality are a dead end, I think. I don't accept that politicians are inevitably amoral slaves to political expediency. That's bullshit. Even the US, with it "conservative" streak of libertarian-rationalism was built by people of moral virtue or at the very least a mythology of those people. Fuzzy as it is, morality is a central part of being human.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: