>Everyone on the planet believes they're right--the right values, the right religions... I'm not aware of an objective answer to morality.

Moral relativism is the most insidious means to reduce legitimate concerns—whether they be ethical, political, or otherwise—to inconsequential.

It's easy to assuage your own feelings of shame/guilt by pointing out that $repugnant_behaviour occurs else where and that's so much worse.

At some point it's required that people actually take a stand rather than participate in the race to the ethical bottom.

> take a stand

This same thought process works for suicide bombers fighting for a theocracy as much as you or me.

Consider that giving this advice to everyone on earth would just lead to more extremism in all directions. E.g. PETA sees meat consumption as animal genocide, but meat eaters don't see animals as being in the same class as people (they're humanists).

The argument here is that most agree that including fine-print in a contract most people don't read, can't realistically understand, and can't even renegotiate to allow yourself to do awful things is abhorrent.

Well, most do except those who engage in the practice, of course.

I was responding to the Upton Sinclair quote but I seem to have attracted some moral absolutists and now the conversation is steering philosophical.

I agree that corporate lawyers are abhorrent ;)

>Consider that giving this advice to everyone on earth would just lead to more extremism in all directions. E.g. PETA sees meat consumption as animal genocide, but meat eaters don't see animals as being in the same class as people (they're humanists).

I categorically disagree. Your stance is what seems to me what would increase extremism, because there's always someone else you can point to and go "BUT WHAT ABOUT..." to justify any arbitrary shitty policy.

Hmm maybe. I'm not evaluating my model of the world on its effect on society if made popular, only its proximity to reality and predictive power.

I don't think understanding that beliefs are arbitrary and fighting for your beliefs is mutually exclusive. If anything there's at least the acknowledgement that because many moral arguments work both ways, bringing people who disagree to your position requires other methods.

If you want to get more technical, there are normative and positive statements, the former describing what we are talking about here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics

In that lens, "Your stance is what seems to me what would increase extremism" is probably positive because it could be evaluated experimentally, but "cutting in line is wrong" is a normative statement.

My open question (and I'm very open to being wrong) is if there's a way to convince line cutters from a culture of line cutters of their wrongdoing without resorting to violence or coercion. How would you do it?

lol k.

So what's your conclusion then. Morals are relative, therefore there are no morals? Who are we to criticize genocide and terrorism?

No, morals are relative, just that. We probably have similar morals as frequenters of a tech website site in English compared to hunter gatherers, so we can even have this discussion in the first place. I haven't been convinced that there's anything universal about the morals we hold across species let alone sapiens in the past 10,000 years or across cultures.

Unless your definition of moral absolutism only encompasses humans living today (with the implication that technology makes certain things possible), which I might agree with.

> No, morals are relative, just that.

And yet by focusing on and stating "just that," you steer the conversation away from the concrete action that this whole thread was started about.

We're not going to resolve moral relativism vs absolutism in a web form, nor should that be a necessary pre-requisite for condemning the immoral behaviour of a company.

It's one thing to debate if the particular action in question is good or not. It's another to attempt to invalidate the entire debate by stating that "morals are relative."

You may think you're just stating "morals are relative, just that," but in reality, the context within which you state it serves only to move the discussion away from the morals of the act in question into some abstract debate about morals in general. It's a distraction. Sometimes the "root cause" cannot be resolved and we should focus on the symptoms and more surface level issues.

I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I'm using this to defend Prezi or something.

The parent comment I originally responded to was about jobs they found morally objectionable and an Upton Sinclair quote.

My reply was about how some people don't actually find those jobs objectionable.

Then the reply to that was about moral relativity (which okay, now we're getting into philosophy).

And now we're about to discuss the purpose of a web forum, but that seems even more meta than this conversation.

I guess in summary, I agree we have veered off of course (arguably the original comment had very little to do with this Prezi incident), but I also think these side discussions are interesting. If you don't want to chat about philosophy you don't have to and it's okay if some people are wrong on the internet.