I think I understood the intended meaning of the sentence; something along the lines of “I consider it morally preferable for everyone to be happy”, and I suspect most people did as well. Is there some particular reason you object to this use of should, which appears fairly standard to me?
I object because it is an extremely sloppy use of moral language, which in my experience inevitably leads to extremely sloppy moral thinking.
Case in point for sloppy moral thinking:
For example, social conservatives sometimes complain that liberals are pushing their morality on them, by requiring things such as not condemning homosexuality. To liberals, this is obviously absurd—nobody is saying that the conservatives should be gay, people are just saying that if somebody is gay, the conservatives shouldn’t kill or harass them. From the liberal point of view, it is the conservatives who are pushing their beliefs on others, not vice versa.
See “To liberals...”. Absolutely nothing in that sentence follows from anything, and it’s a complete distortion of the reality of the issue.
Later in the thread, I have another post criticizing the original post, which may have made my greatest downvote ever.
I saw that Kaj_Sotala is a popular guy with a zillion karma points, but the moral reasoning in the article is embarrassingly bad, and anyone who upvoted it should be embarrassed as well.
I think I understood the intended meaning of the sentence; something along the lines of “I consider it morally preferable for everyone to be happy”, and I suspect most people did as well. Is there some particular reason you object to this use of should, which appears fairly standard to me?
I object because it is an extremely sloppy use of moral language, which in my experience inevitably leads to extremely sloppy moral thinking.
Case in point for sloppy moral thinking:
See “To liberals...”. Absolutely nothing in that sentence follows from anything, and it’s a complete distortion of the reality of the issue.
Later in the thread, I have another post criticizing the original post, which may have made my greatest downvote ever.
I saw that Kaj_Sotala is a popular guy with a zillion karma points, but the moral reasoning in the article is embarrassingly bad, and anyone who upvoted it should be embarrassed as well.