Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

openculture.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 464 posts

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#351

Post by FormerBandmate »

rjbwork wrote: post #343
tjrgergw wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, Choamsky is the ultimate "america bad" man. He practically invented it. "America bad" people are also "Russia not so bad" people. These are highly valuable people for Russia propaganda, of course. They're literal useful idiots.

Seriously. I am actually quite a fan of Chomsky, but he is reflexively America bad. You always always have to take what he says with the massive pillar of salt that his default position on everything geopolitics/IA related is "America Bad".

A lot of academics are. It’s incredibly stupid and shows a blind spot.

Not really relevant to this tho, it’s a question of philosophy. His naïveté in foreign policy isn’t really relevant

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#352

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

tl;dr "the body works a certain way so morality works a certain way" / "morals are advanced now because we're more tolerant"

Basically what he's saying is we are biologically wired to have certain morals and they are converging on some kind of ideal position.

This seems so obviously false that I must be missing something. Human civilization and society has to do with biology, for sure: we get hungry, scared, envious, hateful, desireful, etc; we need protection so we gather together and help each other; when we gather together a form of competition arises along with a form of collective. Clearly humans do certain things because of how our bodies are wired. But within those structures (the "limits" Chomsky was talking about, I imagine) we have an almost infinite capacity for imagination that dictates our behavior (morality being an idea that inspires behavior). You can come up with almost any kind of reason to justify your own kind of morals and what actions are the result. "I need to eat your child's still-beating heart so the imaginary man in the sky will bring rain for my crops!" There's no biological narrative behind that, this dude just made some shit up and everyone went along with it because collective behavior.

Human civilization and society isn't relative, but morality is.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#353

Post by FormerBandmate »

Willish42 wrote: post #338
Varqu wrote: post #265

I find it troublesome to listen to the person who claims that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in their wars [ https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fight... ]

> Chomsky explained that he was not only referring to the fact that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in Iraq: "I am not only referring to this, it is obvious." UN inspectors had to be withdrawn as soon as the invasion of Iraq began, he says, "because the attack was so severe and extreme ... This is the American and British style of war." Chomsky adds: “Let's look at the victims. I only k…

He’s wrong and full of shit. America is responsible for like 5% of the civilian casualties in Iraq, Russia’s killed like 500,000 people, and they rape everyone they can see.

Moral relativism with geopolitics is cheap pseudo-intellectual play. America may not be perfect but we are definitely the good guys compared to Russia or China

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#354

Post by fijiaarone »

nico wrote: post #212
fluoridation wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"1+1=2" as a string of symbols is open to interpretation, however, both you and I understand the idea that that string of symbols is conveying, and that idea is true objectively.

It’s just an agreement that has been pretty much forced on anyone that has a basic school education I can choose to disagree and doesn’t matter what you do I can assign a different meaning to it No ideas are objective truth, and objective truth is something that can’t even be tested

Sounds like a pretty piss poor attempt at an absolute by someone who aspires to the label “sophomoric” in the most asinine and juvenile sense.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#355

Post by meitham »

Varqu wrote: post #265

I find it troublesome to listen to the person who claims that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in their wars [ https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fight... ]

He’s right on that though. I lived through desert storm and the invasion of Iraq. The US targeted our civilian infrastructures in the first two weeks of the war. Virtually we had no electricity for nearly 5 years until the “food for oil” was agreed in 95. I have worked on the Haditha documentary for Nick Broomfield, you can watch it to witness the brutality of the US. Russia is bad, but when compared to the US, pretty much a saint.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#356

Post by johnnyjeans »

simonh wrote: post #242
scoofy wrote: post #201

I think that the thing that most people don't realize about ethics is the meta-ethical problem that axioms are by definition arbitrary. When we really think about the fact that all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms, suddenly the teeth to ethics have a deep, serious problem. The only argument we have at that point is that the axioms "feel" correct, and I have no problem with this basis, I consider…

He’s not saying we have instinctual ethical views. He’s saying we have a biologically determined interpretive framework we use to evaluate ethical questions. This is what he was talking about when he said we make a leap from scattered data to specific conclusions, and we all do this in a similar way. We all just have different data. However when we have very similar data, such as living in a particular culture, we mo…

instinctual -> biologically determined

views -> interpretive framework/evaluation system

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#357

Post by simonh »

bambax wrote: post #306
simonh wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s not saying we have instinctual ethical views. He’s saying we have a biologically determined interpretive framework we use to evaluate ethical questions. This is what he was talking about when he said we make a leap from scattered data to specific conclusions, and we all do this in a similar way. We all just have different data. However when we have very similar data, such as living in a particular culture, we mo…

> when we have very similar data, such as living in a particular culture, we mostly come to the same conclusions That's not my take from the interview, but in any case this is provably false. People living in a given "culture" don't come to the same conclusions: they come to different conclusions -- usually opposite ones. Politics wouldn't exist otherwise. Or most wars, which are almost always between neighbors shari…

I didn’t say the same, I said mostly the same.

Cultures consist of a consensus. When the consensus shifts, the culture shifts. Politics operates within an agreed framework at any given time.

At the time of the founding of the USA some people had misgivings about slave owning, but even some of them still owned slaves. 100 years later there was a civil war over it. Today in the US slavery is almost universally maligned and only exists as a covert criminal activity.

Was there a diversity of opinion at the time of the revolutionary war, and is there now? Sure. Was there a consensus then and now? I don’t see how you can argue otherwise.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#358

Post by mcpackieh »

pixl97 wrote: post #312
mcpackieh wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to slavery From where did that secret sense of guilt come? Maybe there was no sense of guilt at all and it was all performative, cynically done for the sake of his reputation. But perhaps the arguments from contemporary abolitionists were secretly eating away at him from the inside, inspiring a real sense of…

Heh, yea, trying to use the internal feeling of guilt as a basis is a path to complete failure in my eyes. This overlaps with the quest for AI we have and Chinese Room arguments. We can't even argue that people have the same sense of guilt. Is guilt in some people performative for social gains? Do other people feel guilty on things that at least to me make no sense?

I don't argue that people all have the same sense of guilt. Demonstrably they don't. Some people refused to own slaves; some people owned slaves but then released them, while other people owned slaves and never showed any sense of guilt.

What I say is that everybody (excepting the possibility of true psychopaths) has empathy available to them but many people suppress it. It's a universal ability, but not universally put into practice.

> a path to complete failure in my eyes.

And I dispute complete failure. Humanity does not behave perfectly morally, so if that's your expectation then we've failed and always will fail. But most people do have the capacity to behave morally most of the time, and people are guided in this primarily by their internal sense of right and wrong (informed by their innate social instincts.) This system doesn't work perfectly but it's very far from a complete failure.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#359

Post by cmrdporcupine »

mrguyorama wrote: post #165
ajuc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russians on their TV openly argue for killing "every Ukrainian". The fact we are even arguing about this is the best evidence that morality is relative...

And that's just the start. They openly advocate for nuking western nations. Imagine if Anderson Cooper spent tens of minutes ranting about how we should just nuke Russia and China because fuck them

I'm no apologist for Russia, and you can see that from where I started this thread, but...

You act like there aren't actually dozens and dozens of Fox-news style commentators on US media and talk radio who haven't said similar things before, about various enemies of the USA?

The asshats on Russian media saying these things are basically the Russian equivalent of that crap. Demagogues etc

Some of the shit I heard coming from American right wing media after 9/11 was downright scary.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#360

Post by lisper »

nmz wrote: post #341
lisper wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But cultural norms -- indeed, culture itself -- is grounded in evolution. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

Culture has social conventions that are not based at all around survival of the fittest, fashion and language for one are different between cultures. I do not see how they maximize survival, if anything they create needless competition.

You don't understand how evolution works. You need to read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
Post reply on HN