this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (14 children)

You've disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it's justified in your eyes and you'd do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them "the worst" in some way.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (13 children)

What tradition are you talking about?

For example funeral rites help prevent disease from corpses. Without knowing anything about germs.

Or the taboo of incest can avoid genetic defects, without knowing anything about genes.

Traditions formed for a reason. And that reason is way more ancient and more natural than modern logic. It is simply survival.

The people with traditions that helped them survived more often.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (3 children)

So in the cases where I burn corpses, and wear a condom while fucking my sister, wouldn't it be better if my reasons were to stop disease and genetic defect?

If someone asked why I was wearing a condom I could say "so she doesn't get pregnant, also, you want in on this Dad?", and that's better than "because"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Reasons are a human invention to help make sense of the world. If you want to base everything on logical grounds you will run into two things mainly:

  1. Limits of knowledge. Knowledge is always incomplete, as more of it opens up more questions. There are things you intuitively know are good, but can't prove why they are.

  2. Systemic limits of logical reasoning. A sufficiently powerful and consistent formal system (such as formal logic) is incomplete, it cannot prove its own correctness. (Gödel's incompleteness theorems)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, but it is better to give a valid reason, as opposed to "because", right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 minutes ago* (last edited 10 minutes ago)

Can you give a reason though? I guess a child haven't asked you an endless chain of whys yet. By the end of which you can't say 'why' just that 'that's how it is', you've reached the limit of knowledge.

Of course when available knowledge is preferable.

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