There are universal human values, but it's not what these people think they are.
There have been societies that we would think are objectively terrible throughout history. The Assyrians bragged about forcing someone to grind the bones of his wife and children before being executed himself. And people might think "but where's the universal human values in that?" But it's built right into the sentence. The Assyrians did this to the outgroup, because humans are tribal. They forced this guy to grind the bones of his wife and children because family is universally important. And then they killed him because staying alive is universally important.
The problem is with those basic human values that are built into us by genetics, you can take those as a start and then start driving in different directions and end up with something completely different. Sun Tzu said there were 5 notes and from those 5 notes you could create infinite melodies, and 5 basic elements of strategy and from those you could produce an infinite variety of strategies. In an even more correct way, you can start with a few fundamental human values and drive them into an infinite number of systems of ethics, and they can all look completely different.
There have been societies that we would think are objectively terrible throughout history. The Assyrians bragged about forcing someone to grind the bones of his wife and children before being executed himself. And people might think "but where's the universal human values in that?" But it's built right into the sentence. The Assyrians did this to the outgroup, because humans are tribal. They forced this guy to grind the bones of his wife and children because family is universally important. And then they killed him because staying alive is universally important.
The problem is with those basic human values that are built into us by genetics, you can take those as a start and then start driving in different directions and end up with something completely different. Sun Tzu said there were 5 notes and from those 5 notes you could create infinite melodies, and 5 basic elements of strategy and from those you could produce an infinite variety of strategies. In an even more correct way, you can start with a few fundamental human values and drive them into an infinite number of systems of ethics, and they can all look completely different.
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