all you have to do to make literally everyone mad at the same time across all political spectrums is say “cops are neither inherently evil nor incapable of sin and must be judged on a case by case basis, greater accountability for cops is a good thing”
uh, i mean that’s partly the position of this very blog
a rough approximation of God’s Law with regard to the family works, never mind the specifics.
Plants and animals are subject to evolution, undergoing mutation, replication, and selective pressures from their environments, including other plants and animals. This has been observed in at least one species (of lizard, I believe) within human lifespans, nevermind the bacteria.
Why would ideas be any different?
You believe that this similarity emerges because of divine decree, but there is another path.
Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment. Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts. Plus, people just think about stuff. This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.
Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant. This forms the basis for the selective pressure.
Any religion that spreads to be widely believed, then, is going to contain a number of concepts that are effective. If it were too ineffective, it would be destroyed, either by destroying those who hold to it or by being abandoned. If your plan for making a canoe involves drilling a big hole in the bottom, it isn’t going to propagate.
Some of these concepts can be things like, in environments without antibiotics and genetic paternity tests, monogamous marriage and banning adultery.
But of course, that isn’t a guarantee that all these practices will be good. Multigenerational cousin marriage is a tradition in the middle east, where it is successful at some goals (keeping wealth within the family), and damaging over the longer term to health and wellness.
So, of course, the alternative reason that these patterns, which have some success and similar to ones in your religion, keep coming up, is that your religion itself was evolved to obtain them in much the same way.
It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like. These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.
Since I mentioned it in the previous post, let me present an idea of an alien way that omnibenevolence could exist, which is not addressed in religion.
An omnibenevolent deity could create every possible reality, thus ensuring that all possible persons that could exist do exist at some place and time, in some branch of the multiverse.
Obviously, this allows a great deal of suffering and evil, and also creates an untold number of religions that are false, because someone that believes in a false religion is a different person from someone who believes in a true one.
That might be against our intuitions - we might say that a life which knows only pure torment is not better than never-existence - but it does look more like the kind of alien value that a true omnibenevolence might have.
Humanity isn’t defined by someone’s mind. Plenty of animals are conscious creatures with pretty advanced brains, who think and are curious and “love” and act. Perhaps there is a point at which an animal’s brain becomes hyper-intelligent enough to resemble humans, a point that none of them reach, but aren’t there humans out there with significant brain damage? Why not treat their ‘inferior’ minds like that of an animal?
Humanity is defined by something else:
Genesis 9
6 Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.
Sacred vessels. That’s the short and thick of it. Athena has her owls, Artemis has her deer, and God has His humans. You can say that doesn’t apply to fetuses because they’re underdeveloped, but then you’d have to apply the same logic to children, too.
Humans intuitively know that killing their fellow humans is wrong. There’s the ensoulment aspect, to be sure, and the aspect of reaping the soul of your own child prematurely. But the basic moral is that humans are untouchable when it comes to killing them, unless they themselves cross certain lines and become “bloodguilty.”
Of course, this is a religious commandment–just like all law, really. The Pro-Life movement is essentially doomed, if it tries to enact this law through anything but Theocracy. And that means far more than saying “don’t kill embryos.”
Your argument only works for those who already believe.
For those who don’t, for example because the idea of omnibenevolence could be alien but doesn’t look like what religion teaches, a different mechanism for discerning personhood must be created, for humans, their successors, and potential aliens.
And the truth is that if you remove everything but the brain stem, about the greatest brain damage that the body might maybe survive, what you have isn’t a person anymore, but just an empty shell, and people would realize that. It can be dangerous to violate those rules and boundaries for other reasons, secondary effects and worries about ourselves. This doesn’t mean our intuition is correct all the time - humanity’s intuitions aren’t even unified.
You know darn well that if someone makes an animal-level moral classification for some subset of humans, some asshole will come along and try to push as many people as possible into that classification regardless of whether they are even remotely brain damaged. We already have special legal categories that recognize reduced agency.
my bed
are you sure this isn’t an SCP that comes to life at night and strangles people to death, only to be resold in the estate sale to the next victim
🤔
“Abortion does not kill”… Umm… No. Biologically speaking it does exactly that. Scientifically speaking that is the actual intention of abortion. Sometimes it’s perhaps for the best I’m not disputing that, I’m not judging those of you who have had abortions, but it does kill. This is a simple truth that requires no deep revelation to realize.
Yes, but you left out the ‘child’ part. It’s obvious that an abortion ends a biological process that allows the collection of cells that make up a foetus to regenerate and grow - the debate about abortion is not based on a dispute of scientific fact, rather it has to do with one’s personal philosophy of what one does and does not consider human, and so, like with many issues political, there is no inherently correct answer.
Agreed. Though for my part I consider it human fairly quickly. When it develops a heart or brain for example. But that’s me.
But even then, aren’t we all clumps of cells? What then makes it not okay to kill us?
Let’s say I have a plot of land where I plan to build a house. I build half a fence and before I even get to building the foundation I decide I no longer want a house. Am I a crazed home destroying criminal because I tear down the fence I built?
Leveling your own home isn’t a crime either way…
Leveling another person’s home, however is a crime.
The ‘clump of cells’ is not your property, it’s not an object, it’s not a fence, it won’t ever be a house that you can own and sell. It’s your child. You are it’s guardian.
You don’t define ‘life’, ‘death’ or ‘human being’ based on your convenience.
I’m not even anti all abortions. But the pro-abortion side is waaay too eager to claim a fetus is just a sticky goo of cells that you can dispose off as easily as blowing your nose.
No brain, no mind. No mind, no person.
The dispute arises due to a combination of two things. The first is that religious people believe in a process of ensoulment that allows something that lacks a functioning brain (not through all of development, but through a big chunk of it) to be considered a person despite having no mind. The second is our intuitions that this is a bad idea, which possibly exist because infant and maternal mortality were much higher in the ancestral environment, or just a vague discomfort with killing, etc etc.
My suggestion is that the pro-life side go invent better birth control, rather than depending on something they know will fail, but oh wait they aren’t consequentialists.
I never could empathize with those arguments that go “In the transhumanist future how do you know that you’d make the cutoff for existence?” because i always assumed that (a) obviously I wouldn’t, and (b) it seems entirely sensible to me that if my non-existence were necessary to bring about the existence of a happier or better person then I shouldn’t exist. Like, even if the thought experiment was to kill me and replace me with a clone who has very slightly better eyesight than me and nothing else, I’d still say that you should kill me. At least in principle, who knows how I’d act in reality. This has always seemed obvious to me beyond question. I guess I just have atypical moral intuitions.
Say my wife and I have really good genes, such that our son would be at least equal to you in every regard, and have slightly better eyesight. Would you be alright if I killed you, if it meant that my wife and I then decided to have a child?
I would be bummed, but accepting. Actually, since I probably provide less value to the world than the average human, I’d probably have to accept being killed in exchange for the creation of a random person. And that’s ignoring the extra lifespan of someone two decades younger than me.
I feel like there’s an argument to be made in favor of preserving existing people on purely pragmatic grounds, since we don’t have to spend a couple decades raising them into competent adults. Really depends on how much of the GTH consists of augmentation at/before birth vs augmentation as an adult.
Hypothetical people don’t exist yet, and therefore only count based on their probability of existing in the future, at best.
We here at the Mitigated Chaos blog like to post good, relatable content that’s in touch with honest working joes, such as attempting to bait rationalists into arguing whether using cybernetics to transform yourself into a fetishized cyborg spider monster is beneficial to the economy.
Truly, this blog has its finger on the pulse of America.
It obviously is good for the economy?? I don’t see how anyone could hold the opposing view????
ladies, gentlemen, non-binaries, and cyborg spiders,
Rationalist Tumblr
:)
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ST. LOUIS (CN) — A Missouri appeals court upheld a $4.85 million racial discrimination award to a white teacher who was fired from Harris-Stowe State University, an historically black college.
A trial jury awarded Elizabeth Wilkins $1.35 million in compensatory damages and $3.5 million in punitive damages on her claim that she was fired in favor of less senior black teachers. She also claimed Dr. Latisha Smith, the temporary co-chair for Harris-Stowe’s Teacher Education Department, repeatedly proclaimed her belief in “black power” in emails.
Harris-Stowe’s defense was crippled by the fact that it deleted emails in Smith’s account, in violation of a court order.
“During discovery, the trial court ordered the Board [of Regents] to preserve Dr. Smith’s email account,” Judge Kurt Odenwald wrote for the three-judge panel.
“In violation of the order, the Board deleted Dr. Smith’s email account. Because of this violation, the trial court ruled, as a sanction, that the following allegations were deemed admitted: Dr. Smith’s email account contained statements expressing her desire to make the Teacher Education Department ‘blacker’ and that she recommended terminating Wilkins’s employment.”
Harris-Stowe claimed it fired Wilkins for her “inappropriate activities.”
The college made five points in its appeal to the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Eastern District:
But on Tuesday, the appeals court affirmed the trial court ruling on all five points, plus Wilkins’s request $35,603 in for attorneys’ fees and costs.
“We have not yet had an opportunity to review the ruling with counsel,” a Harris-Stowe State University spokesperson said in an email. “After review, we will evaluate the steps the University will need to take in light of the ruling.”
Writing for the unanimous panel, Odenwald noted that Wilkins earned around $67,622 a year when she was fired. She planned to teach into her 70s and had received nothing but positive performance reviews.
“The record is absolutely void of any evidence to suggest that Wilkins was unsuited for her position or that she was at risk of being lawfully terminated,” Odenwald wrote. “Yet, after her termination for ‘inappropriate activities,’ Wilkins testified that her academic reputation was ruined, that HSSU placed a letter alleging misconduct into her employment file, and that she believed she could not receive the necessary recommendations for subsequent employment. Unexpectedly thrust into the job market, the record reflects that Wilkins was interested in, and searched for, similar teaching positions at colleges or universities in the area. However, Wilkins was unable to find such a job within commuting distance of St. Louis.”
Presiding Judge James M. Dowd and Judge Gary M. Gaertner concurred.
Harris-Stowe, in St. Louis, has an enrollment of about 1,400. Annual tuition for an in-state residential student is about $16,984, according to the college website, which estimates tuition for an in-state nonresidential student as $7,484. Part-time students pay $199 per credit hour.
Edit: Huh, forgot I had this in my queue.
Anyhow, above is a point of calibration for how racial discrimination laws are enforced in America.
We can see that they are not unidirectional.
We here at the Mitigated Chaos blog like to post good, relatable content that’s in touch with honest working joes, such as attempting to bait rationalists into arguing whether using cybernetics to transform yourself into a fetishized cyborg spider monster is beneficial to the economy.
Truly, this blog has its finger on the pulse of America.
