Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

One would think you’d have to be consistent, and regard certain people in your heart as you would a dog, if they don’t meet that standard, even if they should be afforded a level of normal legal rights.

Go far enough down, do enough damage, and they are less.  

And that hurts.  You still remember what they were before.  To be reduced in such a way is a half-death.

You can still see the spark.  The dying embers of the flame, isolated moments when some greater fragment of who they once were can rise to the surface.  You desperately try to keep those fragments, until they, too, fade, and the person you cared for is gone.

Why should that damage be possible?

“Free Will” is a handwave, a copout.  If infinite resources for mind engineering are available, there is no excuse that can retain omnibenevolence while remaining what religions now are.  Something different, something exotic would be required.

On some level, you must know this.  You must know that it doesn’t make sense.

The alternative is that sociopaths, unbound by empathy, have more free will than ordinary people.  That they are more worthy than ordinary people.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[forgetfuljust]

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.”

[mitigatedchaos]

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.