[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

It's always good to appear magnanimous in victory, however many people you killed to get there.

It's always good to know that appearance might be deceiving. Many battles were won by deceiving the enemies.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Your criteria are based on feelings and emotions, which are known to be deceiving sometimes.

Taken for granted, feeling or emotion based actions, or instinctive actions, are usually better than just random actions. We don't just randomly stop breathing, or stop eating,
or just jump off the cliff, or punch strangers in the face.
But rational actions based on longer term goals and adequately accurate knowledge of causality can often give even better results.

Emotional based rules can be easily followed by simple minded individuals, including children. But they are lacking in consistency, which makes them inappropriate to be the standard.
Consistent standards can only be achieved through long term goals. Applying them requires adequately complex thinking capacity. Sometimes, the right decision must be made against emotions,  which takes some level of maturity and wisdom.

[alancalverd]

Consistent standards can only be achieved through long term goals.

No. Just state your standards, make sure they aren't mutually contradictory,  and stick to them.

Worth considering Chichester's Deliberate Error Navigation system. If you aim a small boat directly from Plymouth to New York you will probably miss your target and have no idea which way to turn to reach it. But if you deliberately aim a bit south of NY you will certainly reach land, at which point you turn north until you get there.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

It's also important to discuss the differences between moral rules and other kinds of rules, such as rules of games, technical rules, economic rules, political rules, etc. Game rules are usually created to make the games more interesting, less boring, less dangerous, which would make the games be played more and watched by more people. In football, there are rules for off side, hand ball, and back pass. In MMA, there are time limit, weight class, and prohibition of some techniques such as headbuttheadbutt and low blow.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

No. Just state your standards, make sure they aren't mutually contradictory,  and stick to them.

If you only have one statement, you won't get mutual contradiction. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you get a good standard.

[alancalverd]

In all walks of life, a good standard is one that can be widely adopted and makes people safe and happy. Some people are perverse, so the best we can hope for is to satisfy a majority.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

On what other basis should you judge all men equally?

Any request to treat some individuals unequally must be based on some criteria that makes them different than the rest of us. They can be classified as extraordinary claims.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” was a phrase made popular by Carl Sagan who reworded Laplace's principle, which says that “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness” (Gillispie et al., 1999).

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In all walks of life, a good standard is one that can be widely adopted and makes people safe and happy. Some people are perverse, so the best we can hope for is to satisfy a majority.

What was once majority can turn into minority in some other time.
In most ancient populations, and some current populations, the majority do some immoral things by some modern moral standards.

[alancalverd]

I'm not sure about Laplace/Sagan. The claims that the earth orbits the sun, or that all objects fall at the same rate under gravity, would be considered extraordinary at the time they were made, but they were supported by exactly the same, very ordinary, evidence as the current consensus.

This has very little to do with morality and criminality in a civilised country, where certain behaviors are proscribed regardless of who does them.  Time was that the British public hangman was always tried in absentia and found guilty of murder, and his fee was "lost" rather than paid through the treasury accounts. It is symptomatic of a regression to barbarism that anyone can be exempt on the grounds that he is a president or Tory member of parliament.

[alancalverd]

What was once majority can turn into minority in some other time.

So there can be no universal standard, according to classical physics,since simultaneous observation reveals variations across time and space. Relativistic physics allows for evolution limited by the rate of propagation of morality, but the notion of an ultimate moral code remains undefined.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

So there can be no universal standard

The failure of your proposed idea doesn't mean that no one else can come up with a better idea.
Have you heard about moral Zeitgeist?
The more information we have about how the world works can get us closer to the universal moral standard.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I'm not sure about Laplace/Sagan. The claims that the earth orbits the sun, or that all objects fall at the same rate under gravity, would be considered extraordinary at the time they were made, but they were supported by exactly the same, very ordinary, evidence as the current consensus.

Satellite images were extraordinary back then, but not now.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

certain behaviors are proscribed regardless of who does them. 

We can morally evaluate a behavior independently from who does it. But we can't react to it indifferently.
If a little kid shoots someone, we don't treat them like they're an adult.

[alancalverd]

The more information we have about how the world works can get us closer to the universal moral standard.

Or Narnia, or Eldorado. Travelling in a straight line, or indeed along any path, doesn't imply the existence of a destination.

[alancalverd]

If a little kid shoots someone, we don't treat them like they're an adult.

Why not? There's a reasonable presumption of ignorance but if there was a clear intent to do harm, what does it matter how old the perpetrator was? 

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The more information we have about how the world works can get us closer to the universal moral standard.

Or Narnia, or Eldorado. Travelling in a straight line, or indeed along any path, doesn't imply the existence of a destination.

The difference in decisions will determine who will be more likely to survive, and who don't. The destination is to be there as close as possible to eternity. Those who don't strive to achieve it are more likely to die out, and their opinion will become irrelevant for those who survive in the future.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

If a little kid shoots someone, we don't treat them like they're an adult.

Why not? There's a reasonable presumption of ignorance but if there was a clear intent to do harm, what does it matter how old the perpetrator was? 

Ask the lawmakers.
Perhaps, the reason is because children haven't had fully developed mental capacities to deal with all the complexity of the world they are living in. They are not yet independent, so their wrongdoing are more likely caused by the mistakes made by those who took care of them. The corrective and preventive actions are then more effective to be directed toward their parents.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Cheating the Prisoner's Dilemma

An explanation of the Prisoner's Dilemma, Nash Equilibrium, and the Infinite Prisoner's Dilemma.

The problem with moral tests is that they are often thought as a one-off decision. Other people's reactions to our decisions which affect future interactions are often missing from cost-benefit calculations.

[alancalverd]

Ask the lawmakers.
Perhaps, the reason is because children haven't had fully developed mental capacities to deal with all the complexity of the world they are living in. They are not yet independent, so their wrongdoing are more likely caused by the mistakes made by those who took care of them. The corrective and preventive actions are then more effective to be directed toward their parents.

In less civilised societies, the right to own firearms is supported by the lawmakers. The only function of a gun in an urban environment is kill other humans. All the kid is doing is exercising his constitutional rights. How can that be immoral?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Collective Stupidity -- How Can We Avoid It?

Correction to what I say at 11:53  -- I was referring to Milgram's famous experiments in which people administered electroshocks to others when ordered so. It had nothing to do with prisons. The prison experiment was from Philip Zimbardo, not Milgram. Sorry about that.

When we come together in groups we can be so much more than the sum of the parts. But sometimes groups are just much more stupid. Collective stupidity is the flipside of collective intelligence, and we see it a lot on social media. Why are groups sometimes collectively stupid and sometimes not? What can we do to be more intelligent in groups? In this video I explain the most important points.

00:00 Intro
00:45 Emergent behaviour
04:12 Collective intelligence
07:58 Collective stupidity
14:49 What can we do?

Rules based on long term goals can be useful to prevent collective stupidity.