@yboris. Your account says that you are an 'Effective Altruist'. In a nutshell, Ayn Rand believes that altruism is immoral and argues why.
Given your eloquently put understanding of her philosophy, I doubt that you are interested in digging deeper. But in case I'm wrong, everything is summarised in a short interview with Mike Wallace (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHl2PqwRcY0).
The fact that there's substantial disagreement for and against these principles is an argument that whatever morality Ayn Rand is arguing for, that morality isn't universal, it would not be universally accepted.
I am pretty sure that we all agree that humans will never have a complete universal morality because we put so many things into the bucket of morality that could not be addressed by a universal morality. There are people who find it immoral marry between races so no logical system could ever resolve their specific belief. Logically though, we could propose a set of core axioms that everyone could agree on and then build up a system from the axioms. This is what Rand attempts to do so from her logical system you can at least define some moral arguments as universal.
That's a novel argument. I believe what Rand was ultimately concerned with was a morality that is rational and objective; the idea being that one only needs to rely on one's own reason in order to judge what is moral and what is not. As to universality of moral doctrines, if I was feeling malicious, I'd say that the Catholic church was there first (that's what 'Catholic' means, after all). Some rather remarkable moral notions have historically been 'universally accepted', as you say.
"the idea being that one only needs to rely on one's own reason in order to judge what is moral and what is not" - I would argue that this is fundamentally impossible. A commonly used (and IMHO generally accepted) counterargument to that is "Hume's guillotine" or is–ought dichotomy; you can't derive "ought" statements (i.e. morality) solely from logic reasoning and factual "is" statements.
Of course, you definitely can derive a full system of morality logically if you start from a few "ought" axioms - many proposed systems of morality are done this way, and likely Ayn Rand's proposal as well. But in such cases these axioms are the subjective and potentially questionable part, and we don't have an universal agreement on them. If your system has 99% of logical reasoning based on 1% intuitively assumed axioms, that 1% carries pretty much all the weight.
We know where many particular "moral axioms" lead, but that only leads to disagreement about them when seemingly reasonable moral axioms logically lead to various outcomes that intuitively seem unacceptable, so we don't have anything approaching consensus; for every proposal there is enough substantial critique that it doesn't seem suitable to be the One True Perfect morality - perhaps we should keep looking, but perhaps it's futile, there's no strong arguments yet to say that an universal morality must be possible in the first place.
You're quite right. Arguably, an attempt at formulating an objective morality has been made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism . However, it is anathema on HN.
Objectivism has little to do with objectivity, despite sharing the first nine letters. They are two entirely different concepts. Whether objectivism is preferred on HN is another unrelated question.
Objectivism has a lot to do with objectivity. I'm sorry if this is news for you. How reality is perceived and how objective knowledge is attained are at the core of this doctrine -- without these one cannot even talk about rational pursuit of self-interest.
I wasn't even asking a question about HN, just making a remark.
Ah I see your mistake. You assumed my comment referred to a system different to capitalism operating in a country that less than 1% of the people on Hacker News live in.
An easy mistake to make. Happens to me all the time. I see people talking about troop landings in WW2, and I instantly assume they’re referring to the Japanese invading China. Whoops. I’m so silly
Whoa. Calm down. a) I'm not in China, and yes it would be reasonable to mention Chinese economic progress lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty by shifting towards a capitalist economic model under Deng Xiaoping, starting around 1979.
b) I said nothing of the sort about the current system in mainland China being 'good', or the CCP being a 'good thing' (I would be the last person to say something like that about a communist party anywhere), so stop putting words in my mouth and don't make it personal. Capitalism has objectively propelled China's economy to where it is now and made it overwhelmingly more prosperous than it was before they tried it.
Similar story here. Perhaps arts degrees are different, but I could not relate this piece to any of my experiences from when I was studying for a CS degree. It felt as though the author was writing about a different country.
I had several close friends studying for their own Masters degrees in subdesciplines of Anthropolgy and History of Art, and I'm not aware of them having had different experiences either, so my current best guess is down to it perhaps being an undergraduate degree in one of the most exclusive colleges.
It's amazing how every time Ukraine is mentioned in a thread, a poster (from Mukhosransk or some such place) suddenly appears to tell everyone about the virtues of living in an authoritarian petrostate.
Mine has 900 and this is my 3rd or 4th. I'm as western european as possible (literally living in the most western country in europe). My last 5 or so years, most of my social circle has been Ukranian, Belarussian and Russian people. My neighbour here in Portugal is Ukrainian and my family knows her for over 20 or so years.
95%+ of shit I hear about these countries is from US/Western europeans that know little more than what they learned in CoD and some Holliwood movies and making these ideological thoughts. They have good and bad things, good and bad people, but the view from '1st world countries' towards them is silly and it would be even funny if some of these countries and people weren't going through these difficulties
@odshoifsdhfs: Well, I hate to quibble, but it's actually 'Belarusian' (just one 's', you see). I've lived in Western Europe (UK) nearly all my life and I'm afraid I disagree with you fundamentally: '95%' of the people in 'the West' are quite indifferent to the broader region of Eastern Europe, but never in my life have I encountered the kinds of chauvinistic attitudes even approaching those I encountered from Russians. To give you an example: 'govori po-chelovecheski' (in Russian - literally 'speak like a human being') -- can you believe this s**t? Also 'US/Western Europeans' aren't living in tinpot dictatorships with aspirations to annex territories from their neighbours -- a slight, but important difference, which to my mind excuses any ignorance of the region and its politics.
"Are you the high priest and decider of the usefulness of mathematics? To be honest, it almost sounds like some category theorist was super mean to you..."
Interesting and totally not ad hominem response... I believe Kevin Buzzard (an actual mathematician) had a few words about this last year: https://youtu.be/Dp-mQ3HxgDE?t=1039
Note that Kevin Buzzard is talking in the context of convincing "mainstream" mathematicians to use a proof assistant. He specifically clarifies somewhere (not sure where in this video, but I've seen other videos where he clarifies it) that when he talks about "proper mathematics" he is doing so in kind of a tongue-in-cheek, British way and does not mean to suggest that other kinds of mathematics are not proper (don't remember the exact wording).
In the context of that video, his comments about category theorists and type theorists make a lot of sense: type theory people and (perhaps to a more limited extent) category theory people tend to be more easily sold on using a proof assistant since the kind of mathematics they do translate more easily into current proof assistants than, say, analysis or topology.
I definitely do not think that Kevin Buzzard is suggesting that type theorists and category theorists are not doing interesting and/or useful work (after all, the proof assistant he is advocating for is based on type theory). At best, he is making a sociological observation that there is a gap between the type theory/category theory community and "mainstream" mathematicians making the widespread adoption of proof assistants in mathematics more difficult.
I find it interesting that actual mathematicians working in Category Theory, such as Tom Leinster (who wrote a lovely little introductory text on Category Theory [not covering monads though] and made it freely available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09375) are able to engage in polite discussion about the contentious viewpoints on the use of CT without resorting to personal attacks (see 2-3 minutes from his talk from a few years back: https://youtu.be/UoutGluNVlI?t=410) ... which stands in sharp contrast to some of the evangelists, whose attitude in response to criticism often reeks of arrogance and puts people off taking CT seriously, which I think is a great shame.
Given your eloquently put understanding of her philosophy, I doubt that you are interested in digging deeper. But in case I'm wrong, everything is summarised in a short interview with Mike Wallace (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHl2PqwRcY0).