The Gaming Den

darkmaster wrote:Someone didn't play Socrates Jones because then they'd know the problems with Utilitarianism. Namely, utilitarianism, and that is what you're talking about, doesn't have "do no harm" written anywhere in it.

For instance, let's posit a cannibal, we'll call him Bob. Cannibal bob enjoys eating the still beating hearts of little girls so much that the happiness he gains is more than that little girl could ever have, give, and then unhappiness making her watch him eat her heart out could ever be. Is it then morally right for him to murder little girls and force them to watch as he devours their hearts? Too extreme? Fine.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2569

I want to say thanks to whoever originally recommended Socrates Jones in this thread, it was a lot funner than I expected.

@DMS: Looking back I think I'm thinking of a different thread I thought you'd mentioned peoples intentions more than once, but I was mistaken.

@Avor: That was me, and it is a great game isn't it?

On the subject of Socrates Jones I played through it and, though I enjoyed it considerably, I found their method of debunking moral relativism to be the worst thing in their game. If you were going to bring Protagoras into the mix then you could debunk his attempts to apply relativism to the world of scientific fact but moral truths are absolutely relativistic in nature and Socrates Jones declaring that many people recognize "Freedom of Speech" as a "right" does literally nothing to counter that.

And @darkmaster: I don't believe DSM is declaring that he believes utilitarianism to be the one true way by which we can measure what is good and evil. Merely that utilitarian philosophy has certain necessities for what it means to be a good utilitarian, and that following those rules is necessary if one wanted to claim utilitarianism as one's defense.

Even in your scenario you could still find out whether eating baby hearts was good or not through the lens of utilitarianism by measuring the happiness of those involved. If you created a metric for measuring happiness and it turned out that Bob eating baby hearts resulted in an increase in net happiness over suffering then it is in fact good in the eyes of that philosophy. It's not actually a problem at all and if you're coming in with the outside perspective that eating baby hearts is always wrong no matter what then you're breaking the rules. If you're going to say you're using utilitarianism you have to follow it's tenants.

DMS isn't arguing for utilitarianism at all, and I'm specifically arguing against it. I don't want to follow utilitarianism because it opens up the possibility of objectively terrible fucking things being moral. Even if you use Rule Utilitarianism which does posit rules the ones making the rules are going to be fallible and so more and more rules will have to be added until you're essentially back to where we started.

Also, the counter to moral relativism isn't that some people consider free speech a right, it's that moral relativism is the same as having no system of morals at all.

deanruel87 wrote:And @darkmaster: I don't believe DSM is declaring that he believes utilitarianism to be the one true way by which we can measure what is good and evil. Merely that utilitarian philosophy has certain necessities for what it means to be a good utilitarian, and that following those rules is necessary if one wanted to claim utilitarianism as one's defense.

I think darkmaster is talking to Chamomile and not me. I was confused at first too, but at the end of his post (the part I quoted) he talks about me to whoever the post is addressed to, implying that it is not addressed to me. And he has ninja'd me in the meantime.

darkmaster wrote:I don't want to follow utilitarianism because it opens up the possibility of objectively terrible fucking things being moral.

You might think that you're standing up and making hard choices, but really you're just being an asshole. Everyone is going to fucking die, and that's horrible. So you're damn fucking right that something has to moral which has terrible consequences, because everything has terrible consequences you jackass! Basically, you're being this guy, "taking a stand" against being "part of the system."

Well, fuck you. There is no choice to opt out. Bad things happen to good people, and you have to fucking own that. Moral choices will not stop terrible things from happening, it will just reduce the amount of terribleness in the world.

-Username17

No fuck you Frank. Just because terrible things happen does not mean it is moral to cause terrible things to happen. The idea that everyone dies does not make it moral to kill children or violently destroy the reproductive organs of women to keep them from having children who will one day die. You will notice that people who want to destroy everything in existence to keep everyone from suffering in fiction are portrayed as fucking insane. This is because the existence of terrible things does not excuse you doing terrible things. And in the end morality is not about the reality of death happening or the fact that bad things happen, it's about shooting people to death in the street being wrong.

So your argument that it might be morally right to murder children if you take enough pleasure in it is fucking retarded and I reject it outright you piece of shit.

Morality is man created, it doesn't exist without you. The things you think are immoral are a combination of things you've been told are taboo and things that are evolutionarily advantageous for you to dislike. It's not a universal law it's just a vague and ever-changing list of things you personally like or dislike.
It's really hard to deal with the fact that there isn't any universal fairness or morality. That there's no karma or system that makes sure bad things don't happen to good people. Every religion we've ever known posits an entity or force that states objective truths, absolute goods and bads and enforces them. But those are lies, it's not true.
Everyone decides for themselves what counts as good and bad based on what they view as beneficial and injurious. It's just your views. You're allowed to decide that murder is right if you want to, and many people have. For the Jews murder prevented you from getting to heaven, for the Vikings it was the only way in. Every society and every person constructs their own code and you and I are no different. Moral relativism isn't having no system it just admits that you and I weren't using the same system in the first place.

So, what you're saying is that the answer to every question is "yes" and also "no". That is exactly like throwing your hands in the air and giving up. Seriously, relativism is not a system of morals because its answer is literally to give up even trying. So, yes, morality is a construct of man, and no, you will never make a perfect moral system that is internally consistent and matches reality, but "not even gonna try" is literally the worst answer you can possibly give because if you try at least you're attempting to make the world a better place.

Like, I disagree with Frank, and think utilitarianism is deeply flawed, but at least utilitarians try to present a system of morals at all.

darkmaster wrote:So, what you're saying is that the answer to every question is "yes" and also "no".

No. He is not saying that. I am not saying that either. There are hard relativists who say that, but they are stupid. The point is not that the answer to every question is both yes and no, it's that many questions don't have meaningful answers!

Let's take the "murder" question you were throwing around: it's a meaningless question and the answers you get are meaningless. The statement "Murder is wrong" that you keep trying to use as a wedge and a hammer is completely empty. Because the definition of "murder" is that it is killing that is wrong. So you aren't liable to get a lot of disagreements to your proposal that murder is wrong, but you also haven't fucking said anything because the wrongness is contained in the definition of murder in the first place. If you took an action and somebody died and you didn't judge the action wrong, you wouldn't call it murder. You'd call it something less negatively judgemental like "justified killing" or "allowing someone to die."

Every action you take or inaction you refuse to take results in every man, woman, and child on Earth dying. And the odds are billions to one that each of them will die before it is technically possible for them to live had people made different choices. And you don't qualify your choice to eat a sandwich and masturbate to Hungarian pornography rather than catch a flight to Niger and help distribute polio vaccines as "murder" because you don't think it's wrong. If you thought it was wrong, you would classify your callous decision to watch women pretend to be lesbians in exchange for forints while African children died as murder.

You doubtless have some sort of ethical framework for why you think it's OK for you to masturbate while people die of preventable diseases, and I don't actually care what yours is. I'm sure it's something. Everyone needs one to keep from going insane, because there is an awful lot of misery and injustice in the world. But your framework is just yours. It's not anyone else's. If you actually tried to answer the edge cases of what you think the border between "murder" and "allowing other people to die" is, you'd find that literally no one in the history of the world actually agrees with you. Just as no one in the history of the world agrees with me. Or with anyone else, because there is no fucking objective reference frame for this shit. Exactly how much out of your way you have to go to save another dude's life before it becomes an unreasonable burden on you is a totally unanswerable question because ethical frameworks are personal and subjective and not objective or real.

-Username17

So, let me get this straight. If I understand you correctly Frank, because morals are relative, you can't say what is morally worse between say:
killing people who walk on the street because they happen to be black
and not moving to Niger to distribute polio vaccines?

ishy wrote:So, let me get this straight. If I understand you correctly Frank, because morals are relative, you can't say what is morally worse between say:
killing people who walk on the street because they happen to be black
and not moving to Niger to distribute polio vaccines?

Of course I can. But that's only within my internal framework, and the only thing you can logic out is that it's consistent with my internal framework. There's no objective standard, nor can there be one.

Utilitarianism is a useful perspective because it's amenable to scientific reasoning. The axioms are still completely fucking arbitrary of course, but it is (at least in principle) possible to actually determine whether things fit with those axioms or not. The darkmasters of the world will inevitably be caught in a contradiction when it turns out their personal definitions of "murder" and "theft" and all that other crap that they think is a priori bad but is actually just defined by themselves to include only things they think are bad aren't at all internally consistent. But from a utilitarian perspective, you could find out that you were wrong about whether something would increase human contentment or decrease suffering and then change your damn mind because of evidence.

For example: John Stuart Mill was in favor of the death penalty. But he was in favor of it contingent on the idea that state executions of dangerous criminals made society at large a safer place. We now have clear sociological evidence that this is not actually true, which means that John Stuart Mill's moral statements could and would be amended through simple scientific inquiry without having to scrap the framework. On the other hand, if you support the Death penalty because God himself established it in Genesis 9:6, then you're pretty much stuck with that. No amount of scientific investigation can make you change your mind.

But it's important to remember that while we can use scientific inquiry to determine what the best societies are like, we can only do that relative to a completely arbitrary set of criteria of what we think makes a society better or worse. We can come up with a hierarchy of needs and figure out how we can fill in the most of the pyramid for the most people, but there's not an objective standard anywhere that doing that would be better than not doing that. The universe doesn't actually give a fuck if the sun goes supernova and every last human being is lost to time and no living creature ever again sets foot on Earth. It's vast beyond comprehension and nothing we do or don't do has much of an impact on even our small galaxy outside a few light years of radio noise. To think that the universe gives a second fuck whether the number of happy humans goes up or down is hubris beyond comprehension.

Utilitarianism is the best we have. Probably the best we'll ever have. But it's not objectively true. It's just internally consistent. And since that's as good as it gets, we'll take it.

-Username17

So when you said this in the thread about the book of Vile Darkness:

FrankTrollman wrote:One of the main reasons that the Book of VD succeeds where the Book of ED fails is that you don't need a coherent vision of ethics and morality in order to make something "more evil". If the thing a device does isn't evil enough, you can just have it powered by the suffering of a bunch of children you chain to it. Done. You're always going to get into stupid arguments when you try to define what the best thing to do in a circumstance is, but it's always trivial to come up with an action that is "worse". If raping and burning weren't bad enough, just mix up the order.

Granted, there are still points in this book where the reader is stuck asking "Wait, what's so bad about that?", but it's nowhere near as big a mental hangup as the Book of ED problems where they try and fail to come up with a set of things for Good characters to do and not do that makes any sense at all.

-Username17

you were in fact wrong, since morals are all relative?

ishy wrote:So when you said this in the thread about the book of Vile Darkness:

FrankTrollman wrote:One of the main reasons that the Book of VD succeeds where the Book of ED fails is that you don't need a coherent vision of ethics and morality in order to make something "more evil". If the thing a device does isn't evil enough, you can just have it powered by the suffering of a bunch of children you chain to it. Done. You're always going to get into stupid arguments when you try to define what the best thing to do in a circumstance is, but it's always trivial to come up with an action that is "worse". If raping and burning weren't bad enough, just mix up the order.

Granted, there are still points in this book where the reader is stuck asking "Wait, what's so bad about that?", but it's nowhere near as big a mental hangup as the Book of ED problems where they try and fail to come up with a set of things for Good characters to do and not do that makes any sense at all.

-Username17

you were in fact wrong, since morals are all relative?

Weird choice of cherrypicking. However, no. That statement is true because morals are ultimately relative.

There's no one perfect truth, but there are still an unlimited number of actions and results. You'll never get everyone to agree on a specific course of action to be the best, but it's easy to find a course of action that no one agrees with. That's why writing over-the-top evil is simply easier than writing exalted goodness.

-Username17

I picked that because, I remembered it and because it was relevant.

In that quote you say that it is easy to make something "more evil" and above you stated that you there can't be an objective standard to define something as more evil.

- Edit: basically I just find it weird that you can't pick which one is morally worse between:
"killing people who walk on the street because they happen to be black
and not moving to Niger to distribute polio vaccines"
And yet it is easy to define something as more evil than something else.

Something being easy to answer and something having an objective answer are not the same thing. Everyone can tell you what their favorite ice cream flavor is, and it's easy to imagine an ice cream that nobody likes. But there's no objective standard for what makes ice cream more delicious.

-Username17

So writing down an action which is objectively "worse "is impossible, but it is trivial to get everyone to agree an action is "worse"?

ishy wrote:So writing down an action which is objectively "worse "is impossible, but it is trivial to get everyone to agree an action is "worse"?

Yes. Exactly.

-Username17

Unsurprisingly, people tend to have a lot in common. We're all a part of the same species who developed the capacity for moral thought as a tool to promote group stability. We share those origins, and whatever marks they've left on our moral thought. The same set of values our culture drills into one young child probably also drills those same values into the next young child, and so on and so on. Not to the point of everyone being an exact imitation of eachother, but honestly, who had neighbors that told their kids murdering people randomly and indiscriminately was okay? Probably no one. Getting people to agree on moral statements is not really that hard. But the fact that people can reach a consensus on something subjective ("we all like vanilla icecream") does not mean that consensus has objective validity ("clearly, this means vanilla icecream is full of particles known as tastions"). And just because it doesn't have objective validity doesn't mean it becomes useless ("well, since my preference for vanilla icecream isn't an objective fact of the universe I'll have chocolate instead," said no one ever).

deanruel87 wrote:It's more like shit Jesus did. Although it should be mentioned that there is no reason to think Jesus/Jesua existed at all. There are no extrabiblical accounts talking about a super-rabbi whipping up a religious revolution in the area. The factual accounts of Jesus' life from the Bible are also filled with things we factually know did not happen. As a result there is no reason to believe that there is any more historical inspiration for the life of Jesus than there was for the life of Hercules.

Interesting. In my History classes, the existence of Jesus was treated as factual, though of course very embellished. IIRC, there are a few non-Gospel sources.

None that really authoritatively establish anything beyond Christians saying Jesus existed as of a few decades later. However, I would not read too much into absence of evidence because that was a long time ago and Rome was a place where stone temples burned down with alarming frequency. Seriously, I took a course on the city of Rome and something like half the major stone buildings got rebuilt after burning to the ground. Also, Romans sometimes erased people from all records as a punishment, although generally they missed some.

Utilitarianism is for fucktards who want to fuck the lives of other people in the name of "greater good" lol. You guys are losers.

name_here wrote:None that really authoritatively establish anything beyond Christians saying Jesus existed as of a few decades later. However, I would not read too much into absence of evidence because that was a long time ago and Rome was a place where stone temples burned down with alarming frequency.

Not to mention that discounting every account from Christians a priori is a really dumb way to do primary source analysis. Something doesn't lose its historical usefulness just because it gets incorporated into a religious canon.

A much more plausible explanation is that his small cult just wasn't very big in the first few decades after his death, and most of its members were illiterate dirt farmers and fishermen.

The historicity of Jesus has no positive proof I've ever been able to find. If I were trying to prove Jesus existed my entire body of proof would be "I have one extremely unreliable and implausible book source that says so". One would be working with exactly the same factual gravitas if I were trying to prove the existence of Beowulf.

There is no reason to believe the Biblical account of Jesus' life. First, it's got all the magic and miracles in it. Second when it does reference historically verifiable facts, like the names of Kings in the regions the stories take place, they are wrong. Just because Christ's worshippers were illiterate goatherders doesn't mean everyone in the time period around them were. The Romans kept good records that contradict Biblical accounts of the period as did many of the more literate nearby nations. Between fake kings and fake census's and fake mountains there is just no factual basis that we have ever discovered for any part of the stories in Christ's life. They are fabrications complete and total and the belief otherwise requires casting doubt on every historical and architectural record we have of those regions. Positing a historical Jesus requires putting a book that says the earth is flat and rests on pillars above every intellectual inquiry into the matter.

No I think it's much more likely that the reason Jesus is discussed as a historical figure at all is because a third of the world assumes he exists without question and they write a lot. There is better reason to believe in Hercules, Harry Potter, or Harriet the Spy than in Jesus.

The only evidence that exists at all on Jesus are either biographical works that are purportedly by people who knew him or their immediate successors, and slightly later accounts by historians who almost universally report that his followers considered him a historical figure. There is nothing of the sort for Hercules, who was already a distant mythological figure in the first accounts we have of him.

There is no good reason to conflate the question of whether Jesus existed at all with whether he performed miracles or if he was born in Bethlehem due to a census that wasn't really called. Inaccuracies are frankly immaterial to the question of the guy's existence--what we know about the life of Socrates is based on three primary sources that all include inaccuracies or probable fabrications, but no one seriously contests that Socrates existed. Every piece of documentary evidence we have that Leonidas existed was written 30-100 years after his death, conflicts with itself, and the primary authority also claims that people South of Ethiopia have dog's heads.

Basically, if the entire historical record from that time period assumes Jesus was a real, historical person who was walking around and speaking to people, the burden of proof is on the person claiming his non-existence.