Tradition is always the worst reason to do something.

If you had any other reason to do something, you would use that as an excuse.

I can come up with worse reasons than tradition.

Like, to satisfy a sadistic urge or to cause suffering.

Traditions can and often do serve some purpose even if we don’t see them in such a light.

Just as evolutionary traits, only beneficial ones tend to survive the test of time. (Not necessarily beneficial to the individual, but the group)

You’ve disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it’s justified in your eyes and you’d do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them “the worst” in some way.

What tradition are you talking about?

For example funeral rites help prevent disease from corpses. Without knowing anything about germs.

Or the taboo of incest can avoid genetic defects, without knowing anything about genes.

Traditions formed for a reason. And that reason is way more ancient and more natural than modern logic. It is simply survival.

The people who with the traditions that helped them survived more often.

So in the cases where I burn corpses, and wear a condom while fucking my sister, wouldn’t it be better if my reasons were to stop disease and genetic defect?

If someone asked why I was burning corpses, I could share information, as opposed to saying “because”.

Reasons are a human invention to help make sense of the world. If you want to base everything on logical grounds you will run into two things mainly:

Limits of knowledge. Knowledge is always incomplete, as more of it opens up more questions. There are things you intuitively know are good, but can’t prove why they are.

Systemic limits of logical reasoning. A sufficiently powerful and consistent formal system (such as formal logic) is incomplete, it cannot prove its own correctness. (Gödel’s incompleteness theorems)

Yeah, but it is better to give a valid reason, as opposed to “because”, right?

Can you give a reason though? I guess a child haven’t asked you and endless chains of whys. By the end of which you can’t say ‘why’ just that ‘that’s how it is’, your reached the limit of knowledge.

Of course when available knowledge is preferable.

Epistemologically, “that’s how it is” is too declarative for that which we don’t know.

Being asked an endless series of questions for me is going to end with “I don’t know”.

• Why don’t you know?

• I don’t know.

• Why don’t you don’t know why you don’t know?

…