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survivingsibling.wordpress.com
24
January 2014
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Wei Hong: Moral relativism seems to be a fashionable leitmotif of modern Western worldviews. I contend that the very concept, on deeper inspection, is in fact oxymoron. While derivative morals obviously do vary across situational and societal contexts, each contextual interpretation must nevertheless remain founded upon a smaller set of fundamental absolute principles. To deny that morality necessarily contains an absolutist subset is to deny any tool that could make a real moral judgement, in turn denying the very notion of morality. No action, no matter how heinous, can be be morally wrong if I can simply create a new culture where it is not wrong. Moral relativism is merely nihilism with sugar coating.
Someone referenced Steven Levitt’s argument that legalised abortion reduces crime.
Wei Hong: I do not agree with what is arguably Levitt's Freakonomical centrepiece. His methodology contained flaws that lead him to include a revised analysis, together with raw data, in the newer edition of Freakonomics. However, he neglected to mention that the correlation in his revised analysis is in fact not statistically significant. I found this disappointing for a book that otherwise extols objective evidence over “conventional wisdom.”
Several people emphasised that laws should not have “grey areas.”
Wei Hong: While the law must strive towards black and white where feasible, in practice it is necessarily grey, simply because it becomes impossible to divide all situations into legal versus illegal when there are effectively an infinite number of them. On reading the statutes, one notes the abstruse legalese designed to minimise ambiguity, but also a significant reliance upon undefined "grey" concepts such as “reasonableness.” For example, one may be held liable of negligence unless they took “reasonable care” in trying to avoid the negative outcome.
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