Trying to understand morality

I didn’t tag this article because I think it belongs in the realm of philosophy. The totality of all knowledge do not need a tag, methinks.

Hopefully, this article will teach you about morality without telling you what yours should be. I think it’s ok if the concept of morality feels vague to you; you don’t have to analyze it computationally like I will do in the following paragraphs.

This is the the most non-terminating topic I have written about. Hopefully I will finish this article one day as I have more examples to add to this page.

Morality governs actions. There have been moments in life that I felt that one should not do a certain thing. Why is that?

If i want to understand why i felt a certain way in certain situations, it’s the same as trying to understand my emotional response system. The emotions themselves I can treat as symbols (black boxes). In practice though, it feels like self-referencing terms that turtles all the way down. Not gonna turtle myself all the way down again.

The majority of this article will be about examples.

A disagreement about age and sex

https://drewdevault.com/2023/11/25/2023-11-26-RMS-on-sex.html

I read this article thrice. The first two times, I focused on Richard Stallman’s arguments and thought, “that makes sense.” The third time, I focused on Drew Devault’s narrative and thought, “wtf was I reading?”

The lesson I got from here is that consistency and morality are two distinct concepts. One can deny a group of people’s existence yet be internally consistent. After all, this is what math is all about. You write inconsistent code, it’s called a bug. You write inconsistent math, well, I’m sure that I don’t want to use that thing forever.

Still, if we consider the universe as a type checker with terms inside it, then there can be mathematical systems that is in conflict of other mathematical systems. This is what I have touched on before – there can be people who deny another group of people’s existence.

Denying someone of their existence is a recurring issue of free software project leads. Maybe it’s software engineering’s emphasis on math made them feel that it’s ok to be just self-consistent, yet inconsistent with the universe. My opinion is to trust your sensory organs – if someone can express themself, they exist.

Back to the age and sex problem. Limited literature suggests that parents are the main issue. That’s why I hate parental control.

Automated flying weapons

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If I don’t know that the world has discussed a ban on automated weapons, would I have been so reactionary as to write an article about this? No.

Knowing that the pandora box was opened before it was sealed was an important part of the moral judgement. Now we have something other than nukes to worry about. Back to morality – I learned that knowledge is an important part of a decision.

Outrage at financial media coverage

What does it mean for me to be outraged when Bloomberg says that Japan’s current financial problem has to do with rising interest rates?

I was studying the economy of Japan before, so like, the whole society is working on making currency flow fluently. They have made it over 20 years without inflation, so how is inflation healthy?

The message itself. Identity of the sender. Context surrounding subjects mentioned in the message. The perceived morality of the sender of the message depends on the aspects listed before and possibly more.

So perceived morality has to do with message passing. In this case, contempt is perceived. The message is deliberately crafted, of course, to explain Japan’s economy with economic terms. I really hate it.

The rest of this article has been moved to /e/.