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Quote from: David Cooper on 16/11/2018 23:13:38Does it have any exceptions? Show me one.Imagine a genius who want to minimize suffering by creating a virus that makes people sterile. He prevents sufferings from countless number of people from the next generation. Or the virus makes people don't want to have kids. Or replace the virus with a meme.
Does it have any exceptions? Show me one.
That is not a genius, but a selfish bastard who wants less enjoyment for others and more for himself (because he will feel happier if they don't exist). The reality is that people overwhelmingly enjoy existing, and the minority who don't enjoy it (usually because of difficult circumstances) live in the hope of better times to come. There is no valid excuse for eliminating them. They generally want to have children and can be deeply depressed if they are unable to do so. Modifying people not to want to have children is a monumental assault unless they willingly agree to it. You cannot simply convert an immoral action into a moral one by partially killing someone (by changing them to be less than they were before). If you kill someone, they don't mind being dead once their dead, but that's not an argument that painless murder is acceptable. Modifying people by force not to care about loss of capability is immoral in the extreme (except in extreme cases where it isn't, such as where a population needs to be reduced for environmental reasons, and even then it would need to be a case where some people need to stop breeding altogether in order to keep within sustainable limits - in such a case, you would have to do this to the people of lowest quality, and those should ideally be the ones with the lowest moral standards - there are a lot of rape-and-pillage genes which could do with eradication).
There must be a reason why people want to reproduce, to feel joy and happiness, avoid pain, but also willing to conserve resources, make sacrifices, be altruistic, feeling empathy, eradicate unwanted things, create laws, etc. They seem to be unrelated scattered pieces of puzzle. Here I want to assemble them into one big picture using a universal moral standard.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 17/11/2018 21:31:03There must be a reason why people want to reproduce, to feel joy and happiness, avoid pain, but also willing to conserve resources, make sacrifices, be altruistic, feeling empathy, eradicate unwanted things, create laws, etc. They seem to be unrelated scattered pieces of puzzle. Here I want to assemble them into one big picture using a universal moral standard.This sounds like basic animal instincts without laws or religion, both of which evolve. It may be at some point in the future science becomes religion, and the laws protect all animals equally. This would of course involve irradicating all religious belief and accepting that all life forms were equal and food for the other. ??
Finally we get to the last question: how. There are some basic strategies to preserve information which I borrow from IT business:Choosing robust media. Creating multilayer protection. Creating backups. Create diversity to avoid common mode failures.
You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or otherwise incapacitated) people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track and the five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side track. You have two options:Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.Which is the more ethical option?
It all comes down to how you handle the data to be as right as you can be for the available information. Add another fact and the answer can change - it can switch every time another piece of information is provided. Some of the information is prior knowledge of previous situations and the kinds of guesses that might be appropriate as a substitute for hard information. For example, if the only previous case involved a terrorist tying five old people to one line and a child to the other, that could affect the calculations a bit. Might it be a copycat terrorist? Was the previous case widely publicised or was it kept quiet? If the former, then the terrorist this time might have tied five children to one line and one old person to the other, hoping that the person by the lever will think, "I'm not falling for that trick - it'll be five old people and one child again, so I'll save the child," thereby leading to five children being killed.The moral decision itself isn't hard - it's crunching the data to try to get the best outcome when there are lots of unknown factors that can make it close to random luck whether the less damaging outcome occurs, and if there's enough trickery involved, the best calculation could be guaranteed to result in the worse outcome simply because all the available data has been carefully selected to mislead the person (or machine) making the decision.
morality is a standard established by a ruling class; primarily to benefit themselves.i concieve of, and establish my own morality...i am a one man ruling class; and my morality benefits myself and any others i choose to protect.all others concept of morality can kiss my ass.
The universal rule should concern about the existence of consciousness in the eventual results, which is required by the timelessness of the rule.
In chess, the chess piece relative value system conventionally assigns a point value to each piece when assessing its relative strength in potential exchanges. These values help determine how valuable a piece is strategically. They play no formal role in the game but are useful to players and are also used in computer chess to help the computer evaluate positions. Calculations of the value of pieces provide only a rough idea of the state of play. The exact piece values will depend on the game situation, and can differ considerably from those given here. In some positions, a well-placed piece might be much more valuable than indicated by heuristics, while a badly placed piece may be completely trapped and, thus, almost worthless. Valuations almost always assign the value 1 point to pawns (typically as the average value of a pawn in the starting position). Computer programs often represent the values of pieces and positions in terms of 'centipawns' (cp), where 100 cp = 1 pawn, which allows strategic features of the position, worth less than a single pawn, to be evaluated without requiring fractions. Edward Lasker said "It is difficult to compare the relative value of different pieces, as so much depends on the peculiarities of the position...". Nevertheless, he said that bishops and knights (minor pieces) were equal, rooks are worth a minor piece plus one or two pawns, and a queen is worth three minor pieces or two rooks (Lasker 1915:11).
The preference to save child over old people is based on following assumptions:1. The old people will die soon anyway, while the child still have a long life to go. 2. Social and physical enviroment is conducive to raise children. 3. The child can be raised well so he/she can contribute positively to the society. Again, if those assumptions can be proven false, the preference may change.