This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This ranges from a woman’s virtue to little things like the price tag on some item in a nominally “no haggle” US store. Pricing and the economic transaction itself is always a negotiation. Once you understand this, much becomes clear.

Objectivity in ethics is a sort of axiom. If you can’t accept some things as axiomatic, then you have no ground to believe that there are any other minds in the universe, or that physics or maths can tell us anything about the world, etc…

What you are referring to as the standard of rationality is called evidentialism. Aka, a belief is not reasonable unless you can prove ‘em with evidence.

Unfortunately, evidentialism is self defeating, as the thesis cannot hold up to its own standard of rational belief. (You cannot prove that a belief is not reasonable unless you have evidence).

Call it an intellectual farce if you like, but if you’re going to make that claim, then you have to bite the bullet and admit that you can’t really believe in anything—which is, of course, a conversation ender.

But you’ve left out the best normative theory, virtue ethics!

Virtue ethics goes back a step further than consequentialism or deontology and places the moral good making quality in the person himself. Making good choices, then, is a matter of developing a good character that goes ‘all the way down.’ When asked whether you’ll do X for Y amount of money, instead of spending time counting utils, like a consequentialist would, or whether the action can be universally applied to everyone, like a deontologist would, the agent simply acts out of his own good character, doing as a good person would do.

VE points to something like what we might commonly call a ‘man of principles;’ someone for whom price points don’t matter, because they can’t be bought. Someone who stands on their good character for making good ethical choices.

We had the debate we amongst friends a while back, and we came to the conclusion that the amount would simply have to be enough to be worth it, and chances are that’d have to be quite a lot :P

Careful with this argument – information obtained throguh coercion (which includes all forms of torture) can never be relied upon and amounts to a very poor basis for any decision: Torturing the wrong person will always give you all the information you want.

“The million-dollar question is interesting because it forces her to really decide what kind of girl she is.”

now, for a moment, stop and think – put the problem this way:

“Why is not the 100$ question, THE ONE that forces her to really decide what kind of a girl she is.”

This problem’s answer cannot be given by common sense reasoning, an external factor might be introduced that will balance in either way, in both cases, having nothing to do with morality.