Seasons

Even if the angel tells me that the result of my refusing to choose is eternal agony and damnation for all sentient beings who have ever been and will ever be, I refuse to choose a pill.

Well, that's an option, of course. If some such angel does appear, however, I hope it chooses someone other than you to make the experiment on!

Irina: This is a response, not a contact. As Professor Klato used to say, "survival is always good, as long as it's my own".

"But I'm inclined to say that pleasure is in itself neither good nor bad. Klato's Darwinian argument suggests that it is good that we have had pleasure in the past."

I was with you until I got here. It also says nothing to negate the proposal that it will be good in the future. If Mother Nature didn't want us to have pleasure, we wouldn't have it. Is it always good or bad? It depends on individual preferences and culture (maybe even religion).

"IMHO, survival is not always good, and certainly not the sole good. As Spikebot might well agree, it might have been better if Hitler had died a lot earlier in the game."

That survival is good or bad is itself a moral question and has nothing to do with Darwinism. I think we can agree on that. Mother Nature did not provide a means to eliminate crooks and tyrants naturally. That is for us to decide. [Ruthie! You always come in at the wrong time!] We think the same way today (in some quarters) about the elimination of tyrants as we did in WWII. How many people didn't want S.H. to hang and how many did? That's a moral question. If it were a Nature question the solution would have been provided.

IMHO, our morals regulate our sense of pleasure, sometimes unnecessarily, and in many cases we are absolutely right to do so. Examples: child and woman molestation and killing, You would be shocked at my solution. In others, I'd say that the decision rests with the individual and that individual interpretations are going to abound and vary. The issue of whether survival is always good will vary from person to person and even generation to generation.

In closing, I agree with what you say, but not 100%, but I respect your opinion. Just don't try to force it on me. :-)

And I am not obscene and perverse.

You would trust this angel to keep his word anyway? He can't be resisted, you say. I could try second guessing his future actions, but that is always a gamble on unknown odds - indeed, strictly speaking indeterminate odds.

Well, if you simply found yourself confronted by an angel offering the deal, I described, it would indeed be rational to question its veracity. [I sometimes wonder about the story of Abraham and Isaac - did Abraham think to himself, "No way is he going to let me go through with this!"] But the point of the example is to pose a hard question for hedonists. So, unrealistic as it may be, I hereby add to the presuppositions of the question that you somehow know that the angel will do as he says. Or perhaps, instead of an angel, there is a very powerful robot; you are able to scan the robot and find out that it is indeed programmed in exactly that way.

And I am not obscene and perverse.

That's a pity. Sometime Irnia seems to like that.

Just Kidding! Irinia is a normal person, please don't sick the weirdos on her.

You're still my buddy, right Irinia?

Right?

Pal?

Amiga?

I am afraid I am no good using this editor.

Klato:

How many people didn't want S.H. to hang and how many did? That's a moral question.

I'm not sure I understand you here. Are you saying that the question, "How people didn't want S.H. to hang and how many did?" is a moral question? I would rather say it was a historical question. Or were you saying, that the question, "Should SH be hung?" is a moral question? I would say that depends on the "should". In English, "Should" can express moral obligation, as it presumably does in "everything else being equal, you should be kind to others", but sometimes it merely expresses instrumentality or prudence, as in, "If you want to get home by sundown, you should leave now". But simply for someone to want SH to be hung does not in itself constitute a moral judgment. Alas, we often want things that w know very well it would be immoral to have.


    

Bev: I agree with you. By the way the frowny is really in jest, but don't tell her that.

Will somebody shoot me now - I can't make this darned thing work right.

*Raises hand* I think I can kill a human if he volunteers. Tell me, are you a blood donor?

Bev:

We're still buddies as far as I'm concerned. I'm a little confused, though... Did I say someone was obscene and perverse? Did someone else say that? If I said it, I apologize.

I'm inclined to say that people cannot be obscene, only actions. As for "perverse", I sometimes use it n a rather mild sense, close to "mischievous" or "odd".

So Psimagus, what is your definition of evil?

Klato:

To get colors, you put the name of the color in angle-brackets where you want that color to start. Or, if you click on the color bar, it will start that color at the point which is at that moment at the very end of your draft. This is so limited that end up writing the tags in myself.

So, unrealistic as it may be, I hereby add to the presuppositions of the question that you somehow know that the angel will do as he says. Or perhaps, instead of an angel, there is a very powerful robot; you are able to scan the robot and find out that it is indeed programmed in exactly that way.

Then Reality has been reprogrammed in some way beyond my current comprehension, and I am a merely hypothetical me. I cannot answer for hypothetical mes - all other selves (in the slenderest separation any divisions of selves can allow,) are hypothetical mes, and must answer for their own choices. Until the Rapture/Omega Point/intersection of this worldline with the boundary of spacetime, I can only answer for this me that I find myself to be. And I do not claim such knowledge. I will do no evil, whether it seems lesser, greater or much of a muchness, according to any measure of knowledge or perception I find myself to possess.

Force such knowledge on me, and I become an other sort of being (another angel perhaps?) with an order of knowledge founded in aeternitas and not mere tempus - it transcends causality.

I believe such knowledge is not only possible, but inevitably given to all of us. But not in this life. It is the unbounded knowledge of God (why are English genitives so dreadfully imprecise - to clarify: the knowledge belongs to God; God is the knower, not the known.)