[charles1948]

"Overcoming death" would be a disaster. The planet would rapidly become overcrowded with old buggers like me saying "in my day...." and eating everything.

Don't you think that if the planet was populated by old people, we wouldn't have any more wars, as none of us would be capable of military service.  All that exhausting marching about, and trying to shoot accurately at the enemy by squinting through rifle-sights with our myopic eyes.

Surely wars would cease through sheer lack of physical energy to conduct them. Then we could all stay at home and just watch old WW2 movies on the telly.

As regards your "eating" point, this would necessitate further consideration.  Swiftian solutions occur, if we kept to our meat-eating and built battery-farms to output the babies.  But this is too controversial.  Probably a vegan diet, or synthetic  chemical nutrients could sustain us quite well, until the end.

[Kryptid]

Don't you think that if the planet was populated by old people, we wouldn't have any more wars, as none of us would be capable of military service.

And you could kiss the economy goodbye for that same reason. There are important jobs that people have to be physically fit in order to perform.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

"Overcoming death" would be a disaster. The planet would rapidly become overcrowded with old buggers like me saying "in my day...." and eating everything.

If you assume that nothing else would change from current condition. At the time human can overcome death, humans would have considered its consequences and found some ways to anticipate and mitigate them. Curing age related diseases is one of them. Some researches has found that ageing process can be reversed. Another way is to build multiplanetary and multistellar society. Population growth should also be controlled to keep balance between resource production and consumption. That's where an accurate virtual universe comes in handy.

The guy who commits suicide after you have saved his life might be considered shortsighted and even ungrateful, but a gift once given becomes the absolute property of the recipient. If you consider slavery immoral (and it fails both tests) then you can't own another person's life, or have any moral right to criticise what he does with it.

Hanlon's razor is an aphorism expressed in various ways, including:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Probably named after a Robert J. Hanlon, it is a philosophical razor which suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behavior.
The term stupidity can be generalized by replacing it with false believe/assumption. Take any example of something you think as immoral. You can always find something that you think is false in the believe of someone who commit that immoral thing.
Immorality is not a binary concept. Something is more immoral than others.

Ars longa, vita brevis, unfortunately. You have to take medical decisions based on the knowledge and resources you have, not on what the Daily Mail thinks you might have next year.

IMO, we need to consider all possible scenario. Will you consider vaccines if they will be available next decade? next year? next month? next week? tomorrow?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

As regards your "eating" point, this would necessitate further consideration.  Swiftian solutions occur, if we kept to our meat-eating and built battery-farms to output the babies.  But this is too controversial.  Probably a vegan diet, or synthetic  chemical nutrients could sustain us quite well, until the end.

It's also possible for a future human to create mutualistic symbiosis with some photobionts like lichens, perhaps to grow on their hair. So when they are hungry, they could just lay around and sunbath to capture energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen#Photobionts

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Don't you think that if the planet was populated by old people, we wouldn't have any more wars, as none of us would be capable of military service.

And you could kiss the economy goodbye for that same reason. There are important jobs that people have to be physically fit in order to perform.

How do you measure the economy?
How do you relate it to morality?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Talking about economy and morality, we will inevitably discuss about poverty.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Can you solve the Repugnant Conclusion shown below?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

There are two common policies for when people disagree over moral behavior: confrontation, and tolerance. The video proposes a 3rd alternative: engagement.

[alancalverd]

Don't you think that if the planet was populated by old people, we wouldn't have any more wars, as none of us would be capable of military service. 

Modern warfare is increasingly asymmetric, with young idiots beheading people for no good reason and old farts sending drones to kill the executioners. Aged 75, I can still fly a bomber or a drone and there won't be anyone young and fit enough to fly a fighter against me.

[alancalverd]

How do you measure the economy?

"The economy" is all the money that changes hands, plus an estimate of the monetary value of bartered goods. A significant proportion of The Economy is money spent on illegal drugs (estimated) and prostitution (increasingly accurate as the profession becomes unionised and employs accountants - nobody wants to be imprisoned for tax evasion). It has nothing to do with morality, productivity (20% of UK GNP is taken up in mortgage payments for secondhand houses) or standard of living.

[alancalverd]

Repugnant conclusion:
"It's hard to see why B is not worse than A" is the flaw in the argument, right at the beginning. There is an implication that more is or might be better which is neither obvious nor demonstrated. It's an inherently Catholic assumption, has no logical or social basis, and is contrary to any concept of sustainability.

If you make unjustified assumptions, you end up with unjustifiable conclusions.

[alancalverd]

Quote
Ars longa, vita brevis, unfortunately. You have to take medical decisions based on the knowledge and resources you have, not on what the Daily Mail thinks you might have next year.
IMO, we need to consider all possible scenario. Will you consider vaccines if they will be available next decade? next year? next month? next week? tomorrow?

Precisely my point - you need to proceed on the basis of what you know. Vaccines don't cure, but knowing that an antibiotic will be delivered tomorrow, or that a clean operating theatre will be available after lunch,  I might delay surgery in order to optimise the outcome.

[alancalverd]

Confronting immoral behavior is essential, but you need a firm definition of immorality.

Eating meat isn't inherently immoral: the definition of an animal is a living thing that cannot synthesise its body parts from inorganic materials and therefore (at least until recently) has to eat things that have lived before. Meat is an impractical and unsustainable diet for the current world population but a billion people could quite happily enjoy occasional game meat cfor ever.

Circumcision is occasionally medically indicated and has preventive value. Ritual of any sort is stupid and ritual that hurts others is wrong. Oddly, ritual circumcision apparently passes both of my tests if you ask a devout Muslim or Jew, but if it's going to hurt, it should be done only under informed consent and therefore restricted to adults. Or I could argue that it fails Test 1 because you wouldn't like it if I cut off your ear to satisfy my religious convictions that you do not share. So it's wrong under the general provisions of slavery law.

Wife-beating fails Test 1, whatever your religious convictions, and in civilised countries is prohibited under the (confrontational) general law of assault. 

 

[charles1948]

There doesn't seem a way to arrive at a scientific answer to this question.

So isn't the question, from a scientific viewpoint, meaningless?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

There doesn't seem a way to arrive at a scientific answer to this question.

So isn't the question, from a scientific viewpoint, meaningless?

Why do you think so?
If you think that a question can't be answered scientifically because people disagree on the answer, then you can't answer the question about shape of earth scientifically.
If you think that a question can't be answered scientifically because there is till no consensus among science community, then you'd think that interpretation of quantum mechanics is meaningless.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Wife-beating fails Test 1, whatever your religious convictions, and in civilised countries is prohibited under the (confrontational) general law of assault. 

What about death penalties? Do they pass your tests? Is the result of your morality tests affected by the method, such as hanging, firing squad, guillotine, electric chair, gas chamber, lethal injection?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Confronting immoral behavior is essential, but you need a firm definition of immorality.

Here is the definition by Wikipedia.

Immorality is the violation of moral laws, norms or standards. It refers to an agent doing or thinking something they know or believe to be wrong.[1][2] Immorality is normally applied to people or actions, or in a broader sense, it can be applied to groups or corporate bodies, and works of art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immorality
By this definition, something judged as immoral by one standard can be moral when judged by another standard. Universal consensus about immorality can only be achieved by first establishing a universal moral standard.

Judging immorality using above definition also requires that the agent know or believe that what they do/think is violating their believed moral standard. Hence, if we are consistent with that definition, ISIS fighters throwing gays from tall buildings can't be judged immoral, because they believe that what they do is according to their believed moral standard. Those who insist that their action is immoral effectively reject the above definition of immorality.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Eating meat isn't inherently immoral: the definition of an animal is a living thing that cannot synthesise its body parts from inorganic materials and therefore (at least until recently) has to eat things that have lived before. Meat is an impractical and unsustainable diet for the current world population but a billion people could quite happily enjoy occasional game meat cfor ever.

If you accept that immorality comes in non-binary magnitude, the answer is easier. Meat eaters are more immoral than vegans. Trophy hunters are more immoral. Serial killers are even more immoral.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Circumcision is occasionally medically indicated and has preventive value. Ritual of any sort is stupid and ritual that hurts others is wrong. Oddly, ritual circumcision apparently passes both of my tests if you ask a devout Muslim or Jew, but if it's going to hurt, it should be done only under informed consent and therefore restricted to adults. Or I could argue that it fails Test 1 because you wouldn't like it if I cut off your ear to satisfy my religious convictions that you do not share. So it's wrong under the general provisions of slavery law.

I'll take it that your tests still have a loophole needs to be patched.
Painkillers are designed to kill pain. Some circumcising clinics advertized that the patients won't feel any pain. Some said that using laser surgery helps reducingor even eliminating pain.
If you find someone who share your religious convictions, you can cut their ears without violating your tests, which makes your action not immoral.

[alancalverd]

Wife-beating fails Test 1, whatever your religious convictions, and in civilised countries is prohibited under the (confrontational) general law of assault.

What about death penalties? Do they pass your tests? Is the result of your morality tests affected by the method, such as hanging, firing squad, guillotine, electric chair, gas chamber, lethal injection?

Apply the tests. Would you like to be hanged, shot, decapitated, electrocuted, asphyxiated or poisoned? Would you do the same to your nearest and dearest?