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I had a VERY long discussion with a friend who believes that moral values are shaped by societal norms, and that actions like lying or cheating are not inherently good or bad. However, I believe that humans with empathy can distinguish between right and wrong, making them realise some things like rape are inherently bad. There was so much more to this conversation, but this is just a short and simple version of it.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this topic tho

Alex 2y ago

Moral values are shaped by societal norms. Society evolves, and its moral values evolves with it.

And for christians that think that christian moral is absolute and set in stone, in the bible, things that we think are very wrong are seen as rightful: incest (all sons of Adam and Eve marry their sisters), slavery (think about Abraham), adultery (also Abraham), genocide (that one happens so many times...), murder for money (the first christians use their new divine powers to murder all the new christians that doesn't give all their money to the nascent new christian community). The list goes on...

Probably we do things that generations to come will find horrible. We just don't know better.

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Alex 2y ago

Also, the people give the government exemption from moral rules. The government can lie, steal, murder, and do much more, with the support of the majority of people.

2minutebitcoin 2y ago

This sounds very right.

Society is built on the margins - there’s always only a handful of people, or companies with people, that are pushing the boundaries of innovation to make the world a better place. The rest of the plebs are pure maintenance.

Our moral norms in part allow us to practically build societies that scale and give space for the people in the margins to do their thing and advance society.

It is quite possible alternative societies existed but naturally got outcompeted by our current ones because our moral values allowed us to scale to greater sizes and push innovation faster, better, harder and stronger.

Society to a large extent is about scaling trust between people. Decentralized law like religion and centralized law like constitutions and the justice system are tools that have proven useful to build powerful societies

isabella 2y ago

yeah, this was exactly his argument on why humans don't really have an internal moral compass