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Old_Gold comments on Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: PhilGoetz 26 February 2016 06:38AM

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Comment author: Old_Gold 27 February 2016 03:51:52AM *  3 points [-]

Slavery, suffrage, Christianity or Prohibition aren't right or wrong in some objective non-moral sense. Arguments for or against such things are inevitably about convincing people, not about some objective truth.

Well three of those four things are essentially government/societal policies, and one can argue about what the consequnces of adopting or not adopting those policies are.

Comment author: DanArmak 27 February 2016 11:52:25AM 2 points [-]

It's possible to make predictions and arguments about how letting women vote would affect society, or men in particular. But the people who fought for women's suffrage did so on moral grounds of equal rights; even if they had believed suffrage would in fact harm society in some way they wouldn't have changed their minds. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Christianity is even more clearly about moral precepts and not about "worldly" benefit. Anti-slavery is too, although the US civil war mixed that up with a lot of other causes. About Prohibition I don't know enough to say.