Fair enough. I largely agree with your analysis: I agree that preferences are complicated, and I would even go as far as to say that they change a little every time we think about them. That does make things tricky for those who want to build a utopia for all mankind! However, in every day life I think objections on such an abstract level aren’t so important. The important thing is that we can agree on the object level, e.g. sex is not actually sinful, regardless of how many people believe it is. Saying that sex is sinful is perhaps not factually wrong, but rather it belies a kind of fundamental confusion regarding the way reality works that puts it in the ‘not even wrong’ category. The fact that it’s so hard for people to be logical about their moral beliefs is actually precisely why I think it’s a good litmus test of rationality/clear thinking: If it were easy to get it right, it wouldn’t be much of a test.
The Wikipedia page on acid throwing describes it as endemic to a number of African and Central and South Asian countries, along with a few outside those regions, with religious cultures ranging from Islam through Hinduism and Buddhism.
Looking at that page I am still getting the impression that it’s primarily Islamic cultures that do this, but I’ll agree that calling it exclusively Islamic was wrong. Thanks for the correction :)
Fair enough. I largely agree with your analysis: I agree that preferences are complicated, and I would even go as far as to say that they change a little every time we think about them. That does make things tricky for those who want to build a utopia for all mankind! However, in every day life I think objections on such an abstract level aren’t so important. The important thing is that we can agree on the object level, e.g. sex is not actually sinful, regardless of how many people believe it is. Saying that sex is sinful is perhaps not factually wrong, but rather it belies a kind of fundamental confusion regarding the way reality works that puts it in the ‘not even wrong’ category. The fact that it’s so hard for people to be logical about their moral beliefs is actually precisely why I think it’s a good litmus test of rationality/clear thinking: If it were easy to get it right, it wouldn’t be much of a test.
Looking at that page I am still getting the impression that it’s primarily Islamic cultures that do this, but I’ll agree that calling it exclusively Islamic was wrong. Thanks for the correction :)