Richard Stallman and the GNU project

Posted Oct 8, 2019 13:33 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Richard Stallman and the GNU project by frostsnow
Parent article: Richard Stallman and the GNU project

> A better question would be *who* has the authority to enforce consequences for his behavior? What authority, both moral & legal, do they have?

Before Hammurabi, there were no laws or legal authority (more or less; there was some inception point though). Laws don't exist within a vacuum. They are the product of what a society deems to be acceptable and unacceptable behavior which is backed by the authority granted to the state to enforce the laws. This means they change over time. How the laws get made is the political system, but the laws all derive their power from the collective will of the society in which they exist.

Put another way, slavery was always bad, legal or no. It just wasn't until the 19th century when humanity collectively started enforcing it through the legal system.

Richard Stallman and the GNU project

Posted Oct 10, 2019 1:09 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

I hope you're a theist, or at least not a naturalist, because for naturalists it is very very difficult to sustain a case for moral realism.

Richard Stallman and the GNU project

Posted Oct 18, 2019 0:52 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I suppose you're referring to my last statement there. My views are more nuanced than that. It's closer to something like we, as humanity, are discovering these things over time. Observing our collective behavior and modifying as the realizations of the harms of various behaviors come to wider awareness. One can't absolutely condemn those in the past for faults we now find reprehensible, but we can attenuate how much we idolize them on the whole for what they (as we now see it) did do well.

Now is this process finding the "ultimate morality" and if so, is that inevitable? No, I don't think so on either account. But anything that ends up going towards less collective empathy and mutual respect is (in my view) less viable for humanity as a whole in the long term.