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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4128 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I can't find the post now, but it was about a more general sense of "sacred" than the religious one, and revolved specifically around the observation that many people partitioned possible desiderata in two different categories that they refused or downright found it offensive to compare and trade off - so questions like "how many people breaking a leg would be too many to prevent a rape" would be met with "infinitely many" or just incoherent anger rather than serious consideration. In the suggested interpretation, this would be because sexual autonomy is "sacred" whereas mere non-injury is "profane". I don't see our society having renounced things that are sacred in the sense of "how DARE you compromise on anything in this category for the sake of something outside of it".

Many of those scenarios are sufficiently convoluted that the natural reaction is to say "there's someone setting it up, just kill the one who set it up".

Sure, but often (in the case of concrete policy proposals) they are only as convoluted as the reality we now inhabit, so even if that is the natural reaction is quite maladaptive. Besides, I'd consider (a possible interpretation of) The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as yes-chadding the refusal to trade, and even the German constitutional prohibition against (state action) pushing the trolley problem lever is adjacent (though it arguably goes further and prohibits positive action to trade sacred values against each other). Then, of course, the juxtaposition of fierce opposition to child labour and the relative indifference to child poverty and starvation.

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