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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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For the time being, no moral restrictions that you do not impose. If nobody save you knows the baby exists, and you are perfectly amoral, then the baby has no actual morality to count on. So much for the first question.

As to the second, the main difference is that the question of the moral value of animals hinges on the animal's permanent biological inability to influence society, whereas the baby may gain moral weight once you introduce it to society and people assign some to it, or it grows up and becomes able to assert some for itself.

That's just an extremely silly equivocation between morality as a social norm and morality as the actual prescriptions of the norm. A vegan dictatorship that microchips recalcitrant carnivores would thus insulate itself from the admonishment of "ethical backwardness" -- just not in the sense anyone cares about.

the baby may gain moral weight once you introduce it to society

So as long as I don't do that, I can do whatever I like to the baby. Got it.

Yes. I don't see what any amount of theoretical morality will do for the baby in that situation - the buck stops with you in that scenario; if you are the Fritzl type then very unfortunately your morality is all that will have a tangible effect, and the only questions left to ask revolve around whether you assign moral weight to the baby and how you will act on it.

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