orca-covenant
No bio...
User ID: 1931
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I don't see how it's less blurry.
Diachronically, it's not, as you point out, and arguably even worse; but at the present time, all evolutionary edge cases are extinct. Just imagine the kind of culture-war discourse there would be about Homo erectus personhood, but we don't have to care about it, because they're all long gone. You're correct that it's not much an issue of rigor, but a pragmatic one.
orca-covenant
5mo ago
If we're discussing progressives, then we need to explain why they feel justified in saying certain type of gross behavior should be illegal when they've spent the last few decades telling us that people behaving in a gross manner should not be jailed or discriminated against.
Because in this case they see a reason other than grossness to make it illegal. It is certainly a progressive tenet, although one that many people who call themselves progressives often forgo, that one should not be punished only for behaving in a way that others find gross or distasteful. It does not follow that no behavior that others find gross or distasteful should ever be punished. AIUI (might be mistaken), the Bible forbids murder on the grounds that it offends God to destroy something that is created in His image. This rationale makes no sense if one does not believe in the divine creation of humans. Nevertheless, people who don't believe that still have reasons for wanting murder to be forbidden and prosecuted. It does little good to say "But you're fine with sinning against God's creation in this case [eating blood pudding], so why are you not fine with sinning against God's creation in this other one [mass shooting]?"
orca-covenant
5mo ago
Genetic problems from incestuous relations is a problem. There is no comparable problem for people of one culture interacting with people from that same culture.
I don't know. The physical problem with sustained inbreeding is the pathologies that occur when recessive genes with the same harmful mutation are paired together, and low genetic diversity in a group makes it more vulnerable to pathogens and less flexible when conditions changes. It's not absurd to make an analogy with cultural and social diversity. If people get all their memes from the same metaphorically-inbred pool than deleterious memes are harder to identify and lose, and it becomes harder to generate new ones. A society with low cultural and intellectual diversity would allow viral memes to spread more easily, would be very vulerable to social pathologies that different societies could avoid, and would have fewer resources to deal with changes in circumstances.
orca-covenant
6mo ago
Problem is you have no way of telling which action results in less suffering.
It's certainly easier to check, with a confidence high but lesser than 1, whether an action results in suffering than whether it's inherently Virtuous or whether God approves of it.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not.
If you're of the view that physics is the only science worth of the name, perhaps. It's absolutely not the case for biology. If you could see from the inside what a mess taxonomy is, to mention one subfield...
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Not proxy wars, but there were at least one war between URSS and China in 1964 and one between India and Pakistan in 1999, in both cases with both participants having nuclear weapons (and URSS being a superpower). Though admittedly both were fairly small in scale.
Interesting, thanks.
EDIT: ... did I say anything wrong?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I think that's the phenomenon David Chapman writes about a lot in his essays on Buddhism -- how Westernized "therapeutic Buddhism" has very little in common with how Buddhism is actually traditionally practiced, and if anything resembles more 19th century German Idealism, of all things?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn?
One is strictly dependent from a specific, non-replaceable (with current technology) human body, the other is not. You can agree or disagree that this is morally relevant, but this is a significant difference between a fetus and a newborn. At the very least, it implies a very different distribution of costs.
Plus, birth as a Schelling point -- the development from a single cell to basically-a-newborn and from a newborn to a fully sapient human are both gradual, hazy, and complex, while birth is an unambiguous, easily observable discontinuity.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
Group selection, AIUI, only works when selective advantage for groups traits is stronger than selective advantage of individual traits. This is generally not the case because 1) individuals reproduce faster than groups and 2) individual heredity is much more reliable than group heredity. Strong pressure on groups is not necessarily sufficient to counter these two factors. That said, the situation is different if the group selection is in fact kin selection, in which the component individuals of a group have a high probability of sharing the genes being selected for.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
There was plenty of lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating in times and places when theistic faith was most ascendant. Do you think Renaissance Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Ottoman Empire had none of that? Members of the Sicilian Mafia all consider themselves scrupulous Catholics. You may say they are not, in fact, good Catholics (and I would agree, and AFAIK so does the chief of the Catholic Church), but convincing them that God is watching them would not stop their crimes, because they already believe that. People usually think their behavior is either righteous or at least justified by the circumstances; the thought does not become "I better not not burn down that store, God would punish me"; it becomes "Let's burn down that store, it's what anybody would do in my place, actually it's a pretty good idea, God will be happy I'm not a pushover".
orca-covenant
1mo ago
IMO that's an interesting but rather strange objection. Doesn't the presence of angels and demons require more flaws in the scientific understanding of physics than fast interstellar travel, not fewer?
orca-covenant
3mo ago
Ah, nevermind, then. Thanks for the context.
orca-covenant
3mo ago
That seems extremely dependent on fads of the time and initial axioms, honestly (which divine authority are you going to take? On what subjects?) -- are experiences of divine revelations less tied to what is currently popular than experimental results?
orca-covenant
6mo ago
then your definition of honor is so selective as to be meaningless, and I suspect it really just boils to people you agree with
If the goodness of a cause is too subjective to judge people from, what makes honor any better a standard? The concept of honor also varies quite a lot from time to time and from place to place -- it's not like one can't construct a coherent definition of honor that does not include Lee's conduct.
orca-covenant
6mo ago
Putting a statute of limitations on revanchism is a good idea, but not one very compatible with the establishment of the State of Israel in the first place.
orca-covenant
7mo ago
Moral teaching regarding what, if I may ask? I swear it's not a polemic question, I honestly know nothing about this matter.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
True, and fair enough.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
With that they can deduce my biological sex (with a karyotype) and my ethnicity (with finer sequencing), but they still couldn't find my specific identity unless my DNA is already in a database somewhere (which is probably the case for people for whom this kind of security is an issue) that they have access to (less likely). Tbc, this is hypothetical, I haven't purchased their services and I probably wouldn't go to these lengths if I did.
orca-covenant
10mo ago
but he kept using that term.
He kept mentioning it, which is quite different.
orca-covenant
10mo ago
Under what conditions and in what contexts?
That is the key part: in such a case, the status of X as Y applies only to a particular context for a particular purpose. Formulating that question as "Is X a real Y?" obfuscates that by turning Y-ness into an inherent, universal, and permanent quality of X.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Wouldn't that depend on the context the term is used? "Room for rent, looking for people with a prostate" I agree is bizarre and dehumanizing; but "People with a prostate should occasionally get tested for prostate cancer" seems to me pretty reasonable, and if anything more precise than any plausible alternative. Similarly, I wouldn't be caught dead using "people who menstruate" as a term to refer to women in general, but something like "people who menstruate are at a greater risk for anhaemia" is if anything better targeted advice than "women are at a greater etc." (I think, I'm not an expert on anhaemia), given that a fairly large fraction of women do not menstruate and therefore are not the subject of that statement.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
The Orthodox Church (Roman or Eastern?) also took active part in quite a lot of that killing and torturing that RandomRanger mentioned above, though. If His Holiness the Bishop of Rome is the one who decides who does and does not count as a Christian, for example, I don't think you then get to claim that Innocent III o Julius II does not qualify as one.
If this description is accurate, than this would imply that Marines are a much greater threat to their own society than subway hobos, at least per capita. Being gratified by killing and mutilation, and being likely to uncontrolledly resort to it upon provocation, sounds far, far worse than being unable to hold a job and a home or being numbed by drugs.
I realize this is an extremely minor and tangential point, but...
... every "Bible basher" I've met to date knew quite well what "theory" means in a scientific context; "evolution is just a theory" are not, in my experience, the words of scientists expressing a properly humble understanding of the physical world, but of precisely the people who need the scientific definition of "theory" explained to them.
EDIT: I'm open to seeing counterexamples, of course.
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