Re: Dyson (Was: Paths to Uploading)

Alejandro Dubrovsky (s335984@student.uq.edu.au)
Mon, 11 Jan 1999 05:28:08 +1000 (GMT+1000)

On Sun, 10 Jan 1999, Terry Donaghe wrote:
> >
> > Do you honestly believe in objective, universal standards of right
> and
> > wrong? If so, please state where objective unioversal standards of
> eright
> > and wrong come from and what makes them so. You may well
> revolutionise a
> > large chunk of philosophy (I doubt it, but I'd love to be proved
> wrong).
> >
> > Samael
> Samael, please explain how you can, in good faith, follow a philosophy
> which can be construed to justify anything. Your subjectivist
> philosophy implies that it may, under certain circumstances, be
> morally okey dokey to nuke a newborn in a microwave. Hey, there's no
> wrong or right! We can do anything!
>
> I'm not a philosopher and I have no grand justification of objectivism
> other than the fact that your subjectivism can justify all of what
> most of us consider evil in the world - genocide, murder, rape, child
> abuse, etc etc.
>
But even if it is most of you (us?) it is still not objective. I think
it is quite likely that Hitler and other fellow nazis of the time would have agreed to genocide, murder happens relatively frequently so i'm assuming there are is a sizable (0.001%?) chunk of the population that doesn't find murder to be evil. Rape, i might have even talked to some people that agree with this form of conduct, and about 15% of parents worldwide seem not to be offended enough with child abuse to stop practising it (this is a wild guess/extrapolations from local statistics/rumours/easily memorisable slogans ("1 in 8, etc") but even if this is out by an order of magnitude, which i'm pretty sure it's not, it is still a huge amount of people). So according to objective morality, do these people not exist? are they explainable as noise in the data? chau
Alejandro Dubrovsky