> crimes that are in principle clearly wrong, despite what a local community believes.
Who has the magical power to know which crimes these are that are "in principle clearly wrong" with such certainty that they can override the community's beliefs? We're all fallible humans and nobody has a special private line to The Truth.
I like to think that saying lynching black folks is "in principle clearly wrong" is one example where I am okay with thinking that I am certain enough to override a "community's beliefs" about what is right or wrong.
The problem is that the people who thought lynching was fine had the same sense of certainty that you have. Which all by itself is enough to refute the claim that such a sense of certainty is sufficient.
Yes, they did. But we've improved as a species. We may not recognize what our descendents will consider barbaric in our behavior, but we can be the ratchet that prevents us from repeating the barbarism of our forbears.
Disagree, cultural norms are not just formless things that can come and go entirely without context. We can never have a discussion about the morality of slavery without the historical context.
You aren't disagreeing with me, you're agreeing with me. You're saying that ethical and moral claims are context dependent, not absolute. Such claims include claims that, for example, abolishing slavery or lynching is an "improvement". Which is exactly my point.
I don't think it's safe to assume something obviously bad today won't be good by many/most measures tomorrow. In fact I'm quite certain that the advancement of society doesn't rely exclusively on constraints, but also on expanding freedoms and loosing poorly conceived constraints.
To me, any syllogism which tells me I am not qualified to say that lynching is not immoral is probably broken.
Rational argumentation is fine but it requires that we start with some reasonable premises.
Like any math problem, if you get strange answers it indicates that you're doing the problem wrong. If you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter and you get something like 31.4 you might wanna check your math.
In this case, if you've "refuted" the idea that racially-based lynchings are universally morally impermissible, you might really wanna look at your math.
> Rational argumentation is fine but it requires that we start with some reasonable premises.
Yes, but you aren't doing that. You aren't deriving the conclusion that lynching is wrong from some reasonable premises. You're just asserting it. Another poster downthread did offer a reasonable premise, the golden rule, from which the conclusion that lynching is wrong can be derived. But that doesn't completely solve the problem either; see further comments below.
> if you've "refuted" the idea that racially-based lynchings are universally morally impermissible
This claim is already refuted by human history.
> you might really wanna look at your math
You might really wanna consider that ethics and morality are not math. You can't establish ethical and moral claims simply by deduction. You have to get people to agree to them--or you have to impose them on people by force (and then you have to deal with the ethical and moral problem of justifying such use of force). Even if you have premises that you think are reasonable that support your ethical and moral claims, you still have to get other people to agree to the premises. That's why ethics and morality are hard.
And, for what it's worth, this principle that unexpected results indicate an error is quite useful.
I can't edit out the double negative in my first sentence which makes it incoherent (thanks to HN's time out system) but I can expect that most readers would see that and understand it is a grammatical error, and I'd expect that they'd have a some certainty about their reading of that sentence.
I think the golden rule is usually sufficient. almost nobody wants to be lynched. likewise stolen from or harmed. the world is a better place with people abiding by that
This is fine, but it's not basing claims about what is good or bad on just your personal opinion or feeling. It's basing it on a general principle that is supposed to apply equally to everybody. That is indeed the only way of escaping the merry go round of shifting personal opinions and feelings. But it is also not perfect: not all ethical and moral issues can be resolved this way, because now you have the problem of which general principles should be used. Not everybody agrees with the golden rule, just as not everybody agrees that lynching is bad.
To illustrate why even reasoning from general principles has issues, consider: are you also against punishing people who commit crimes, on the grounds that almost nobody wants to be punished?
I very much hope most of us here think that lynchings for having the wrong colour of one’s skin is wrong, while history has showed that there are communities that don’t consider them crimes.
There are good reasons why we try to minimise how much of law enforcement that are left to peoples discretion.
> There are good reasons why we try to minimise how much of law enforcement that are left to peoples discretion.
I don't know where you're getting this from. Practically all of law enforcement is left to people's discretion. The people exercising the discretion just aren't members of juries in most cases.
No, they are police, prosecutors and judges. And that is one of the problems with the US system of justice. Justice is supposed to be blind. As it works now, the white upper class kid gets a slap on the wrist after raping an unconscious woman, while the black kids go to prison for minor possession. And since the people in charge don’t have worry about the laws being applied to them, they introduce outrageous laws. The governor never has to worry about his daughter going to prison when she needs an abortion.
Who has the magical power to know which crimes these are that are "in principle clearly wrong" with such certainty that they can override the community's beliefs? We're all fallible humans and nobody has a special private line to The Truth.