Example: I believe that IP is a direct contradiction of nature, sacrificing the advancement of humanity and the world for selfish gain, and therefore is sinful.
Edit: pls do not downvote the comments this is a constructive discussion
Edit2: IP= intellectal property
Edit3: sort by controversal
I thought of a few stupid things, but everyone talking about kids made me think of this one.
I am strongly against Trickle down suffering.
“I put up with this terrible thing when I was your age, and even though we could stop it from happening to anyone, it’s important that we make YOU suffer through it too.”
Hazing, bullying, unfair labor laws, predatory banking and more. It’s really just the “socially acceptable” cycle of abuse.
I agree, and I take it this far: “I worked hard and paid for my house, why should some lazy loafer get housing for free? I paid 24,000$ in tuition, why should kids get free college?” I think that, at some point, one guy has to be the first guy to benefit from progress, and all the people who didn’t benefit just have to suck it up. I would 100% pay a much higher tax rate if it meant that homelessness was gone, hunger was gone, kids got free education… I’m Canadian, so I don’t need to say this about health care. Yeah, I paid an awful lot of mortgage, but if someone else gets a free house? Good!
UBI is coming to Canada sooner rather than later.
Strongly agree. Someone has to break the cycle of abuse, it’s wrong to contribute to the cycle so that it can continue harming others in the future.
Edit, one example that comes to mind is the extremely long shifts in the medical field in America. One guy who was really good at being a doctor happened to be someone who voluntarily took on very long hours. Now there is this persistent mindset that every medical worker must accept long hours and double shifts without notice and without complaints.
There are a few cases where it benefits the patient to avoid handing off the case to another doctor, but generally it just limits the pool of people who are willing to go into the medical field, and limits the career length and lifespan of the people who do go for it.
I sort of disagree. Some pain and suffering is what helps some people become better versions of themselves. Doesn’t work for everyone though, so it shouldn’t be the default experience, but rather a last resort.
I agree with OP, and I think you may as well but are stating it differently. Hardships and difficulty so indeed provide the opportunities to better oneself, but that shouldn’t come from contrived abuse like bullying or hazing. Those are instances of someone using their previous difficulty as an excuse to make it harder for someone else which I don’t believe is morally correct.
Maybe, maybe not. My thought for the comment was “tried to help, didn’t work, off you go and experience as is”.
Because not everyone learns the same way, so we can’t apply a fix-all universal method. Some kids, adults even, don’t get it until they experience it themselves.
What that “it” is changes from person to person and every time we think “why don’t they just understand”, maybe it’s that they can’t understand and need a different way of learning “it”. Which sometimes is painful.
I get you, and I agree with that. What I’m talking about is more specific. I’m not saying remove all suffering. Suffering will always exist. I’m saying if given the option to cause suffering to another or not, “well, it happened to me” is NOT justification for suffering.
Yes, facing adversity does build resilience. However, creating adversity for another just because YOU had to face it is wrong. I had a professor who called our career a “brotherhood of suffering” and would purposely create artificial stumbling blocks and make things more difficult because he had the same done to him. It’s perpetrating a cycle of abuse. I’ve now gotten to the point where I’ve taught in university and in the hospital and I try to break that cycle. It’s still a very difficult path, the content and pace are still taxing. Many still don’t make it to graduation, why make it harder then it needs to be?
Misguided pride or PTSD perhaps?
It’s not pain and suffering that you admire its perseverance. You can have one without the other.
Perseverance against what if not pain?
The fact that this is your reply goes to show you need to learn more.
Sorry, I’m not into S&M play.
Unavoidable pain and suffering, sure. This is about contrived, otherwise unnecessary suffering to “prove a point” or pay it forward in a negative way.
Absolute free speech is overrated. You shouldn’t be able to just lie out your ass and call it news.
The fact that the only people who had any claim against Fox for telling the Big Lie was the fucking voting machine company over lost profits tells you everything you need to know about our country
While I’m tempted to agree, the big problem here is that if the government can decide that some speech is illegal, they can use that to silence people they don’t like.
Obviously the system we’ve got now in the US isn’t working, but we need to tread carefully when giving the government power to decide what is or isn’t the “right beliefs”.
Yeah, it’s like giving anyone who’s living somewhere illegally no due process. If they can deport people based on what they say is illegal and you have no way to fight that, then who’s to say that they aren’t going to call you illegal and deport you?
That is exactly what was on my mind when I wrote the comment.
It’s not perfect, sure, but we as a society should be capable of deciding that some things aren’t okay without giving the state carte blanche to censor as they see fit. If the system can be abused, then we ought to fix it, not forgo it entirely.
Plus, governments and companies already suppress or ban a bunch of speech, often in favor of the ruling class. I doubt outlawing harmful speech like parent comment suggests would be the straw that breaks democracy’s back.
Hard to be the breaking point when it’s already broken. But if it weren’t broken already… then I think it actually might.
What we could do is make “journalist” a protected profession. So just like you can’t call yourself a fiduciary unless you hold to a certain set of ethical guidelines, you wouldn’t be able to call yourself a journalist unless you agree not to lie (among other things). So if you forgo the title of journalist, you can say whatever you want (obviously the other laws still apply, so you still can’t slander or libel, and if spreading misinformation causes harm you can still be liable). But if you are calling yourself a journalist, you voluntarily assume a higher standard for what you are allowed to say.
I think that would avoid any first amendment issues. But I’m not a lawyer, so please don’t take my word for it 🤣
Nah,
If I walk up to you on the street and tell you to hand over your money or I’ll kill you, that’s enough to land me jail. Its maybe even enough for you to be justified in punching me in self defense, if you feared for your life and there was no other way you could ensure your safety.
But suddenly if I say I want to put a million people in a gas chamber that’s A-OK? Suddenly no one can punch back or else they’re “just as bad”? Suddenly the lines are super blurry and the slopes are super slippery and its absolutely impossible to tell what a threat of violence is.
Its a crime to say you’ll kill one person, its your right to say you’ll kill a million.
I understand and sympathize with your point, but unfortunately the law will never be that simple.
To use your example, you walking up to me and saying “hand over your money or I’ll kill you” is not justification to respond with lethal force per se. The missing element here is assault - in other words, I have to believe you both are able and intending to do me harm before I can respond with force. If no reasonable person would believe that what you said was actually a threat (like, for instance, if you were a five year old) then I’m still not justified in harming you in self defense.
Suddenly the lines are super blurry and the slopes are super slippery and its absolutely impossible to tell what a threat of violence is.
Yes. They are. And that was your first example, the one meant to be unequivocally black and white.
The problem here is fundamentally an epistemic one. The law is not a thinking, reasoning being. It is merely a system of procedures. The law does not know - it cannot know - the difference between right and wrong. It only knows what the rules are, and those rules may be wrong.
You might think that there is absolutely no reason to advocate for the mass murder of an entire group of people. And under 99.9% of circumstances, I would agree. But if the zombie apocalypse broke out, I might find myself in favor of killing all of the zombies - and legally, there’s no reason that wouldn’t be genocide.
The law doesn’t know whether zombies are people. It doesn’t know whether or not we are. Therefore, there must be some way to have discussions about the law that are above (or outside the scope of) the law. That’s what politics is, fundamentally: the discussion of the law that’s untouchable by the law. Even if we tried to make certain political stances illegal, we wouldn’t succeed, because that is one area in which the law is necessarily blind.
So we can’t curtail the first amendment.
We can’t execute Nazis.
But we could lynch them, as that would be a political act and not a legal one.
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People in the US often misunderstand what sorts of speech can be “free”. There’s plenty of restricted speech in the US - hate speech can intensify the sentencing on crimes, libel and slander are both punishable civilly, speech that directs or is likely to incite “imminent lawless action” (e.g. yelling fire in a crowded theater - that is actually the legal reason for why you can’t do that if there isn’t a fire).
That doesn’t even begin to cover the sorts of speech that are heavily suppressed by the government and media but aren’t legally restricted - like how the media chooses not to cover large popular protests sometimes (famously, the antiwar protests around the invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan), or gives disproportional representation to counter protesters to give the illusion that both sides are equally popular, or how anti-capitalist stances are generally ignored or downplayed. Not illegal, but if you can’t really engage in those sorts of speech publicly, they may as well be.
Agreed, news needs to be held to a higher standard than it is now. There’s a whole list of journalist code of ethics that basically distils to be truthful, minimize harm, be independent, and be accountable.
*some example of minimize harm;
- don’t dig through a celebrities trash looking for condoms
- if there’s an accident you don’t show pictures of the dismembered victims
- don’t identify victims of abuse
- don’t claim an accusation as fact until proven (this why every news stations says “allegedly” all the time)
I believe that the more wealth a person has, the more likely it is that they abused and harmed others to achieve that wealth. Therefore, the more wealthy a person is, the less I trust and respect them.
I don’t think that it’s wealth generation is equal to immorality. But the more wealthy you become the more insulated you are from the struggles of regular people.
If capitalism was not so psychotic, inhumane and bloodthirsty, I might agree. In the current world market? If you are worth more then double/triple what your average local family house is worth, I will probably hate their personality and what they stand for.
They’ll still get the benefit of the doubt and I’ll still engage, because everyone is their own person, but they are playing 3-0 behind and have lots to prove. There’s a reason upper management is full of similar personality types.
I think you just proved my point. Your willing to give them the benefit of the doubt (a moral judgment) but you’re gonna be wary of them.
Nothing is wrong with that stance.
What about dentists, doctors, programmers, etc.?
I feel like this should be more about those involved in the upper echelons of megacorps.
Mine is related: I believe in an estate or “death” tax, at least on the ultra-wealthy. These people have exploited workers their whole lives to “earn” it, and almost certainly used unethical loopholes to hide it and keep it from being taxed, so at least recover the taxes before it’s dropped in the lap of their heir. They won’t even personally be negatively impacted by it since they’re already gone. Sure, the next-of-kin gets less, but that’s the whole point; they did even less to actually earn it!
Housing as an investment is wrong.
The price of basic human needs should not be tied to the rise and fall of the stock market, nor should ones retirement depend on the hyper inflated values of houses. 500K+ for a small house is absolute price gouging bullshit, regardless of location.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. A house is to live in. It’s a place to live, not a financial instrument. They are only inherently worth some amount that aligns with wages in a given location.
So, like my first house cost a year of the median wage in my city; it was a wreck, so let’s say two years of pay was the average house. I think my mom’s house was around that too, but now they are more like 5x the median pay, that makes no sense because they are the same thing - a place to live.
It’s like the notion of a “starter home.” When I bought my house and was debating some pros and cons, my realtor was like, “don’t worry, you can just buy your dream home later and use this as a rental property!” Uhhh. This is my home. To live in. It’s the only one I ever plan to buy.
Hehe they’ll say anything to make a sale. It does seem dumb: “Don’t worry you can save up to become a landlord when you can afford the house you really want again”.
I completely agree. However, homeowners typically vote more in local elections.
Hell, I had an argument with someone who didn’t support a fucking hospital expansion in town because they were worried about the impact of the expansion on their housing price.
I agree but what you’re talking about is not liking Capitalism since it has to do with why housing is an investment.
Most capitalism hatred is actually referring to this I think: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
Stopping corruption and making sure our laws are not loopholed by rich ppl or even just not enforced for the rich would make the world a lot better.
Every system is corrupt. The older you get, the more you learn things true. It’s also why communism doesn’t work. We’re inherently selfish. We can try to make it harder to take advantage of but people will always find a way.
Being “proud” of your acheivements is fine.
Being “proud” of your country or your state or your football team that you’re not a member of,or your ethnicity is douchebaggery.
Killing yourself is ok. You don’t know what it’s like to be them and be in their head.
I’ll never do it. Even in darkest depths, but respect anyone’s right to say peace out.
Agreed. The idea that you owe people your life is pretty nuts. At the end of the day, you can be robbed of everything, including your life. But it’s the one thing you’re not allowed to end. In a perfect world I do think that people who are suicidal should both:
(a) have to discuss their suicide with a trained professional. What does this look like? Idk. But probably along the lines of “are you capable of healing / can we heal what is causing these thoughts or no?”
(b) be able to get professional euthanasia. No pain, someone to be there with them through the process. Not just a sterile room where you go to die, but a place you are going to leave your pain behind and move on
If there is an afterlife, hopefully they find peace there.
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That’s absolutely true, and as I said, I’m not a professional and I would never claim to be, and would never want someone to end their life if they could be helped (probably every person who would regret it). That being said I think there is a social stigma of “don’t do it because what would happen to [x]”? I’ve had close friends that ended their lives and the focus after was on who it affected rather than why or how they got there and why they didn’t get help. Additionally our society is built on a system of “work to live” which can certainly be crushing to those who already feel crushed. Hopefully we can do better in the future.
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Sure, I won’t say anything further. The original post was about common morals that you may disagree with and now we’re in pragmatics, no reason to continue
The pay rate of the lowest paid worker of any company or institution should be somehow legally and directly tied to the pay rate of the highest paid executive.
If the executive wants to make more money and gets a raise, then so do the workers.
That cats should remain indoors. Pet cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds in the US alone, not to mention all the other animals that they also kill. I love cats as much as the next guy but keep them indoors for the love of nature
It’s okay to call stupid people stupid to their face - them, their ideas, whatever it is that they’re doing dumb. In the U.S. we’ve gone too far over on the “tolerate all people and their views” which has allowed fascism and MAGAts to gain far too much power - putting idiots in their place is (or at least would have been) the best way put it back where it belongs.
I think there’s a difference between not calling someone an idiot and tolerating their bad ideas and actions though. I agree people need to be stopped, and not tolerated, but when the only answer is insulting them with various names like idiot or nazi, all that ends up happening is they keep their toxic and destructive ideas hidden from the public, and then band with others labelled idiot and nazi, until they feel comfortable in a group to express their rhetoric without fear.
At which point you make such groups illegal and start investigating and prosecuting, officially and not.
Yeah, I know that won’t get us to a state of educated well-meaning humanity caring for all life. But I can’t deny seeing some assholes getting their own medicine will make me smile for some time
Nice, a clean descent into authoritharism and fascism.
fuck the slippery slope apparently
I’ve spent a day thinking whether to reply this or not. In the end, can’t expect you to read my mind, so here it goes: look at my point about not getting to a better place, which is why I am not going to actually do things like that, despite holding the position that oppressors have every right to become oppressed. Sadly, this way does not end oppression
we’ve gone too far over on the “tolerate all people and their views”
Criticism isn’t intolerance. Confused about freedom of speech?
Circumcision is multilation
unpopular moral take: All religions are absurd cop outs and you should choose your own model for how to be a good person.
The stock market should be illegal in all countries. Its basically a legalized gambling ponzii scheme.
Retirement also shouldn’t be tied to this type of system.
Suicide shouldn’t be illegal. If you’ve tried treatments and seen a therapist for years but just want out - you should be able to schedule a day to be put to sleep.
I think its immoral not to give people a dignified way out.
Open borders. I strongly believe in open borders as a moral imperative. Human beings have been migrating for survival, resources, and exploration for over 20,000 years. The concept of nation-states imposing constraints on movement is a modern invention that doesn’t align with the inherent human need for freedom of mobility. People in the southwestern states of the US with Mexican roots will tell you “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”
Stealing is OK, the ok-ness of the stealing is inversely proportional to the wealth of the person you steal from.
If you steal 100 dollars from someone who only has 1000 dollars, that’s reprehensible, but if you can nick a few million off a billionaire fucking go for it.
