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There is nothing intrinsically morally wrong with high levels of wealth inequality. If wealth distribution were to stay as unequal as they are now, but total per-capita wealth increased at a steady rate, that would be a wonderful outcome for everyone.

The issue is that the high levels of wealth inequality are used to capture nearly all of the wealth that is created, thus increasing the wealth inequality even more. That is a clearly unsustainable system.




>There is nothing intrinsically morally wrong with high levels of wealth inequality.

That would depend on your moral system, wouldn't it?


Only if meta-ethical moral relativism is correct.


Only if 'relativism' is reduced to 'different relative to my own' due to solipsism. There remains the possibility that there's an absolute morality intrinsic to the universe that your own personal models fail to describe accurately.

i.e. just because you cover up your eyes doesn't mean that I can't see you.


You said it depended on "your" (which I took to mean "ones own" rather than specifically referring to "me") ethical system. If there is an absolute morality, then the morality of any given action is not dependent upon the morality subscribed to by the actor.

[edit] Furthermore any statement about an action being moral or immoral that doesn't explicitly reference a moral system is implicitly assuming a moral system. I find "It is my belief that X is moral" to be stylistically inferior to "X is moral" and clearly the former is a factual statement, while the later is a statement of opinion. HN is a discussion forum in which stating opinions is acceptable, so I use the terser, stronger statement of opinion preferably to the more verbose factual statement.


I was commenting on your assertion that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with high levels of wealth equality. The degree to which that is true, assuming an intrinsic morality, is the degree to which "your" (which I intend to mean you, the person posting as aidenn0) moral system corresponds to that intrinsic morality.

As there was no argument pertaining to the actual existence of an absolute morality, all we are discussing is your model. All that we can gleam from that model is that steady per-capita income increases imply a good outcome for everyone, and that a good outcome for everyone implies that economic disparities that exist along with that outcome are not morally wrong. Therefore, there's no need to assume that moral relativism is a valid outlook, only that there's no proffered evidence that your assertion represents an aspect of that hypothetical intrinsic morality.

If there were one, evidence that a particular condition compels a particular conclusion in one's model would only imply a particular condition within a moral universe would depend on the correspondence of one's model to the reality of that universe.

Also, blah, blah, blah, blah-de-blah




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