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

401–410 of 464 posts

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#401

Post by debok »

robotresearcher wrote: post #178
debok wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "cannot be applied"? Of course it can be applied. We know that those states and governments are wrong by the universal moral code condemning murder, slavery and genocide. We would have no grounds to condemn these things, if it wasn't for a universal moral code.

So what fraction of dissenters are allowed before the universal code ceases to be universal?

If a universal moral code exists, it wouldn't cease existing even if 100% of people dissents from it. The whole point of a universal moral code is that it exists outside of us.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#402

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #365
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better translated ‘though shall not murder’ for the modern reader Which cleverly punts the problem to the language centre of the brain, which gets to decide whether a particular killing was a good kill (execution, enemy combatant) or bad (murder).

It does for a reader, but reading wasn’t common ~4K years ago when it was written. These are communal truths verified through generations of dialog and discussion.

> does for a reader, but reading wasn’t common ~4K years ago when it was written

The point is murder is defined as bad killing. That doesn’t help us define what “bad” means. (Or whether a particular killing is bad.) It leaves it to context. Depending on your perspective, that’s either useless or savvy.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#403

Post by pauldenton »

JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote: post #261
debok wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do human groups glorifying immorality imply that there is no universal moral code? If the universal moral code exists outside of those groups, then it can be applied to their actions, and we can call them wrong for the thing they glorify. Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong. By which standard do you know them to be wrong? Such a standard must nece…

You use your time machine to travel back to the year 1350 and make contact with a Mesoamerican society that just loves to capture, torture, and execute their neighbors en masse, because doing this is a Good Thing. It pleases the gods or whatever. You think it's a Bad Thing though. You are now outnumbered 100,000 to 1. How do you prove to them that your moral code is the Universally True one, and not theirs?

By collapsing their civilization with a few thousand Conquistadors as you rally their neighbors who were the regular victims of that capture torture and execution because they've lived there for centuries if not Millenia unlike the men in boats who just showed up and have no such historical grievance

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#404

Post by pauldenton »

Spooky23 wrote: post #57
maeln wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Chomsky was always like this. He is an unapologetic hypocrite, constantly criticizing the U.S and "the west" while defending "socialist" country for the exact thing, and often even worse, than he was criticizing the U.S for. Even going as far as denying the existence of genocide during the Yu…

Chomsky is a provocateur. The currency he measures is attention. There’s some interesting things that he has to say, but ultimately, not worth getting your blood pressure up over. It’s good to critique the US or the west - you cannot improve without dissent. Fortunately, Chomsky is in the US and enjoys unimpeded speech and academic freedom.

Yeah. Not like Snowden or all those other provocateurs forced into exile.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#405

Post by suddenlybananas »

fsckboy wrote: post #382
scoofy wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a bit overwhelmed with the pushback on this point. The fact that axioms are, again, by definition arbitrary, should be anything but controversial. The axioms of Euclidean geometry are very obviously arbitrary, in that, we can create other forms of geometries should we choose to. The fact that we are attempting, with Euclidean geometry, to create a model of the phenomena we experience is good and useful, but that…

a million monkeys on typewriters typing arbitrarily will ultimately type out every known work of literature. But the known works of literature were not created arbitrarily.

You're confusing arbitrary with random. We have chosen the axioms of Euclidean geometry because they are useful, but we could very easily chose different axioms and derive a different geometric system. We didn't choose the Euclidean axioms randomly, but they weren't an a priori given either.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#406

Post by suddenlybananas »

cryptonector wrote: post #334
lsy wrote: post #164

It's weird to hear Foucault described as "amoral" when he himself claimed to be a moralist [1]. What is meant by moral relativism in this case I think is merely that morals do not come to us handed down by God or Nature as Chomsky claims, but are a constant choice made by people over a potentially infinite range. But to assert that the morals don't come from God is not to say that morals are not valuable or worth hav…

Lenin claimed to be the most moral because he had just one moral value: the good of the Party. One can claim to be moral while being amoral, and Lenin is the perfect example.

I don't think Lenin ever made such claims, Marxists generally reject moral justifications of socialism because they view them as idealist.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#408

Post by mcv »

ajuc wrote: post #139
mcv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anything in philosophy or politics falsifiable? If politics is not his field, then whose field is it? Are only polsci majors allowed to discuss politics?

"Peace for our time" by Chamberline and Germany's dependence on Russia are as falsified as you can be in politics. Chomsky would probably support both :)

Fair point, and definitely a valid refutation of his position on Russia-Ukraine.

My point should have been that everybody is entitled to their opinion on politics and philosophy, but you do have to take facts into account when available. They're not always available, and it's not always obvious how relevant they are to a new situation, but you obvious shouldn't ignore facts completely, and that does happen way too often. In every corner of the political spectrum.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#409

Post by boffinAudio »

robertlagrant wrote: post #12
boffinAudio wrote: post #4

All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling. For example - there is no such thing as "Europe", unless enough people get together and agree that this thing that doesn't really exist, does exist and shall be named "Europe". "Europe" isn't a physical element, it isn't a naturally occurring substance - it is instead a human cultural construct which only persists for as long as the word continues to be used…

> All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling. This seems wrong. It's not a lie to give something a name. Why not say "All culture is a truth which only persists in the re-telling", given it is true we call Europe Europe?

Europe doesn't exist anywhere in the world except in the fallacious minds of human beings.

Gold exists. The sun exists. Gravity exists. Elephants exist.

Europe does not.

We cannot conjure up gold just by saying "gold shall exist!" - we can, however, lie to ourselves and say "Europe exists!", and - as long as the human mind is around to perpetuate it, this lie will persist.

Gravity doesn't need the human mind to making it work. Neither does fission. These things exist in the universe whether humans like it or not.

The moment humans are unable to perpetuate the fallacy of "Europe", it ceases to exist entirely.

>Its not a lie to give something a name.

Yes actually, it is. You are not your name. Your name persists only as long as others help you make it persist.

This is not true of the ground under your feet or the air you breathe or water you need to survive.

America is a fiction that only persists for as long as there are human beings around to say "that fiction exists and we shall refer to it as America and in so doing, make this thing that doesn't exist, a reality which persists - but only for as long as we state it does".

And therein lies Chomskys' dilemma: he cannot tell his audience that one culture is less of a lie than another, because: they are all lies. They don't really exist, except as human constructs - and these are arbitrary, requiring a decision - an ability which we humans, by all reading of the natural laws of the universe, shouldn't really have...

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#410

Post by boffinAudio »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #13
boffinAudio wrote: post #4

All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling. For example - there is no such thing as "Europe", unless enough people get together and agree that this thing that doesn't really exist, does exist and shall be named "Europe". "Europe" isn't a physical element, it isn't a naturally occurring substance - it is instead a human cultural construct which only persists for as long as the word continues to be used…

I think you're mistaking an arbitrary or relative concept with a lie. Culture is relative and amorphous, but it's not a lie. It shapes our worldview and it's a framework we can apply to our understanding. Just because it is not the unified worldview as everyone has doesn't make it false.

From the perspective of the natural world, all culture is a lie that humans tell themselves in order to create something that doesn't exist.

We conjure these things into existence by telling ourselves - and hurting those who don't agree - that the thing is real, even if it isn't.

>Just because it is not the unified worldview as everyone has doesn't make it false.

This is demonstrably incorrect: Just ask a Russian to explain American foreign policy. More Americans than Russians believing such lies do not make them true - they just add the force of human attention to the fallacy, which helps it persist in light of other forces of human attention ..

>arbitrary

Lies are arbitrarily persisted as a result of the _decisions_ of human beings, which don't have any force, weight or energy other than what we say they have, and that force, weight and energy only persists for as long as we, humans, say it shall - and not a moment longer!

"Gold is real. Europe is not."

Shelley was onto something ... the fiction of Ozymandias is one lie from which we all will learn, whether we like it or not.

Post reply on HN