In other news today...
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Yeah, that number is most likely on the very low side as well, as it assumes near perfect RNG with drops, most people think it is realistically closer to $225k with some people calculating that it is over $1mil to ensure max gear. So, pretty free to play if you ask me.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
If you don't want to work under a particular contract, then don't work under it and let someone else take the job. If no one wants to work under a particular contract, the employer will have to modify the contract to make it more palatable.
You want to flip burgers for us? **You vote as we tell you to.*" You don't want to do that? We control 80% of employability in this town and 90% of minimum wage jobs. Have fun starving.
Good thing that the right to free speech (and specifically in this instance, the right to freedom from compelled speech) is an inalienable right, huh?
Which, by your earlier post, you think you should be able to sign away.
No, I just didn't list out every potential conflict between actual natural law rights. The government is allowed to interfere if the employee is a hitman and the employer wants his wife offed, too. Duh.
Because The Right To Work No More Than 40 Hours Per Week isn't actually a natural law right, natural law rights take precedence over it.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear magic tooth fairy in the sky thread is
.Everyone else here seems to agree that human rights are a thing. It can't possibly be true that the European Union is in charge of handing them out, and they must have come from somewhere...
Yes, philosophical pondering through the ages. No fairies required.
As evidenced by you not agreeing what they are, anyway, since by your argument minimum wage or in fact anything preventing slavery is tyrannical infringement of employe[e|r] rights.
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@Dragoon you could’ve posted some science that any mortal has a chance of understanding, but I guess that wouldn’t have been your style.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear magic tooth fairy in the sky thread is
.Everyone else here seems to agree that human rights are a thing. It can't possibly be true that the European Union is in charge of handing them out, and they must have come from somewhere...
Yes, philosophical pondering through the ages. No fairies required.
Did Isaac Newton invent gravity?
Of course he didn't. He discovered how it worked through philosophical pondering. But gravity existed before he thought through it and puzzled it out.
Natural law rights came from somewhere. They didn't come from the EU. They can't have, because people already had rights before the EU existed.
As evidenced by you not agreeing what they are, anyway, since by your argument minimum wage or in fact anything preventing slavery is tyrannical infringement of employe[e|r] rights.
The minimum wage can't be a natural law right because wages are paid in money, and money, the concept of abstracting value into a specific set of [pieces of paper|precious metals] doesn't exist in a state of nature.
Let's go to the state of nature, though. How could you possibly set a minimum wage in a barter system where you are trading arbitrarily skilled labor for an arbitrary set of goods? Wouldn't you need to have the same guy fix prices for every kind of skilled labor and every single good or service in the entire economy.
Slavery, on the other hand, is a violation of the actual natural law right to alienate (sell) your labor.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Inalienable rights come from God, not from whichever EU functionary has to approve of promotion practices at ostensibly private businesses.
In fact, one of the inalienable rights is the right to own property and specifically to trade your labor for property at a mutually agreeable exchange rate.Oðin says that the only work I need perform to own something is to murder the previous owner. God as god, right?
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@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Inalienable rights come from God, not from whichever EU functionary has to approve of promotion practices at ostensibly private businesses.
In fact, one of the inalienable rights is the right to own property and specifically to trade your labor for property at a mutually agreeable exchange rate.Oðin says that the only work I need perform to own something is to murder the previous owner. God as god, right?
Good thing Oðin isn't the one handing out natural law rights, then, isn't it?
I can't prove to you that gravity exists. I could demonstrate it pretty effectively if we were standing in the same room as each other, but I'm here in NJ and you're off wherever you are.
Yet somehow, if I dropped a pen, everyone reading this knows what would happen.
Everyone here seems to agree that human rights are a real thing that exist. Yet nobody seriously takes an Oðinist view.
I wonder why that is.
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Here is some more SCIENCE for you:
Multilevel polarization switching in ferroelectric thin films
Ferroelectric materials have found widespread use in everyday technology mainly owing to their electric polarization that can be switched between two distinct states. Overcoming the binary limit of ferroelectrics ...
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Everyone here seems to agree that human rights are a real thing that exist.
But it's not difficult to find people that don't - either in history or just across the world. You mention slavery, which has existed and very likely exists this day. You don't have to go very far back in history to find large groups of people that don't consider slavery to be evil or bad. It was just the default state of being. So, yes, I would say that your right of selling your labour, and indeed, the human rights, are entirely invented by humans. And, as something that is thought to apply to everybody equally, it is a rather recent development (and unfortunately not one that is accepted everywhere). There is nothing that requires those rights to exist, and for most of human history, they probably didn't. (And if things really go to shit, they might not in the future.)
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
So, does the Eucharist cause Christ to suffer? Of course it does. The reason it works is that He suffered on the cross so that you may have eternal life.
I... think you've got things quite wrong here? I have never heard that taking the communion is causing Christ to suffer?
[...]It's that He died for our sins and descended into Hell where he was tortured by Satan for three days without cracking. If He didn't do that, it wouldn't be the Eucharist. It's a necessary step in the process. The Maillard reaction doesn't cause the cow to suffer either.
But you're still getting the cause-effect relationship wrong, IMO. Christ didn't suffer because we were going to take the communion. He suffered, for whatever reasons he did (or chose to, in this case), and then, because he suffered, we take the communion (to remember that suffering etc.).
By comparison, a cow very much suffered (=was butchered) because it was going to be eaten -- if not for the fact it would be eaten later, it would not have been raised (and suffered during it, if you're follow the vegetarians/vegans ideas), and it would not have been butchered.
So no, I still don't think the "suffering" part is a valid analogy here.
It's not a perfect analogy because it was a jokey shitpost that amounts to "lol vegans are going to hell".
Given that context, I think the analogy is pretty close.
I think some of this is that words no longer have meaning.
I kind of agree, to be honest. But we're here to endlessly
random topics, so... 
I assume you're familiar with the fact that some people claim to be Catholics and claim Catholicism allows them to do things that Catholicism actually forbids? This sounds like some of the vegans aren't very good vegans.
Maybe, but I think the key part that you're missing here is that while there is a single authority defining what "being a Catholic" means, there is no such thing for vegans (or even vegetarians, however for vegetarians there is less ambiguity). So everyone decides what "being a vegan" means. So yes, some vegans will think that other vegans are not "good vegans" because they have different definitions of it.
Right. Despite the fact that there's a pope of Catholicism, we still have the problem of bad Catholics. Since there's no "pope of veganism," imagine how much worse the problem of bad veganism must be.
When someone tells you that they're a vegan, what they mean to imply is that they don't use any animal products at all. That might not be true of the particular vegan you're talking to, but that's what they want you to think. By exactly the same token, if you ask in the Garage I'll give you a list of people who claim to be Catholic because they want you to think of them in a particular way that isn't actually true.
He suffered, He died, and now they're eating his flesh. That should probably give them pause.
I think Catholics have long since found a way to solve that problem without it being cannibalism (since even in the Roman time this was a frequent critic thrown at them!). I assume it's yet another of those "mysteries of faith" which, tbh, from the outside look very much like a big cop-out ("you just have to believe and stop asking questions!"). Part of the issue can probably be brushed aside by saying that the accidents of what they eat isn't human, but that doesn't avoid the fact that indeed being human is part of the essence of Christ.
A quick search on the topic brings many results but the first ones I skimmed (from Catholic sources, so those aiming at justifying it, not critics!) are not extremely convincing. They draw differences between eating a part of a human vs. eating Christ as a whole (I assume that this is again linked to the essence thing that allows saying that the host contains the whole of Christ), or between eating something that is dead (or dying) vs. something that is alive (Christ) and so on. But from a quick read, these all look like sophistry more than real arguments. I guess you'll have to ask a proper Catholic theologian to get an answer to that?
I'm a jokey shitposter and not a proper Catholic theologian. When I asked a priest about it when I was a teenager, he laughed and told me to quit being an asshole.
I wish I had a better answer for you than that.
I'm surprised at this, although I guess it's mostly because I'm guessing at the distances involved.
Not only that (distances aren't that large, but a large proportion of Catholics are elderly people with mobility issues, in a country with a less car-centric culture overall...),
This part is a fair point. At every Mass in the US I've ever been to, there have been a few elderly people who don't drive themselves but instead get driven by friends or other parishioners. Because this is the US, everyone except those couple of elderly people have cars. I can see how that would work differently in France.
but also a whole lot of historical/cultural reasons.
I could write yet another wall of text about it, but I think the key difference is between an "old" country with a long history and a "young" one where less gradual evolution (in religious practice and everything else) has had time to happen. For simplicity you could also put that to "religious fervour," and it's likely you'd probably say that most French Catholics (even only counting those who actually go to mass somewhat regularly, not just those who only go to church for weddings and burials) aren't "true" Catholics (but then I'll point out that even the Church hierarchy doesn't agree with you here, and let you think whatever you like).
Well, most French Catholics aren't good Catholics. The same is true of Spanish Catholics, and German Catholics, and American Catholics, and every other kind of Catholics you can think of. I'm not nearly as good a Catholic as I ought to be. A big part of the point is that you're going to fuck it up, and that God will forgive you because He loves you.
So I get it. And I'm not trying to shit on you or on French Catholics generally.
I'm going to blame it on you guys not having cars.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Everyone here seems to agree that human rights are a real thing that exist.
But it's not difficult to find people that don't - either in history or just across the world. You mention slavery, which has existed and very likely exists this day. You don't have to go very far back in history to find large groups of people that don't consider slavery to be evil or bad. It was just the default state of being. So, yes, I would say that your right of selling your labour, and indeed, the human rights, are entirely invented by humans. And, as something that is thought to apply to everybody equally, it is a rather recent development (and unfortunately not one that is accepted everywhere). There is nothing that requires those rights to exist, and for most of human history, they probably didn't. (And if things really go to shit, they might not in the future.)
That's not what human rights mean.
Do Chinese Muslims in concentration camps have the right to freedom from slavery? Of course they do. It's just that their government is tyrannical. China isn't in charge of handing out human rights either. And it's a good thing, too, because they'd be really bad at it.
That's the whole point I'm making. Governments aren't the ones who grant rights. The fact that a tyrannical government fails to protect its citizens' rights doesn't mean that the right isn't there. It just means that it's a bad government.
ETA: Now that I'm not on my phone and can see what I'm typing, @Arantor's argument is premised on human rights/inalienable rights/natural law rights (all the same thing) existing, and that Musk demanding that employees work more than 40 hours per week violates the employee's rights.
If you're arguing that there's no such thing as rights at all, then @Arantor is wrong because Musk can't violate his employees' rights because there's no such thing as rights.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
That's the whole point I'm making. Governments aren't the ones who grant rights.
It's not the government who grants those rights. The population of a certain country has essentially granted itself these rights. In most cases, they've become enshrined in laws through various processes. The government has thus been delegated the responsibility to uphold and defend those rights.
I'm not sure about @Arantor's argument. I'm mainly responding to your comparison with gravity. There's a very distinct difference. People didn't start to become bound by gravity just because models of it were discovered. But people clearly weren't bound by these rights before their "discovery". Rather, we formulated those rights and are now enforcing them where we can. (Which isn't everywhere, again, unfortunately.)
There is nothing saying that the population can't change the scope or meaning of those rights again. (It's happened before, and it will happen again.) If the population decides that demanding more than 40 hours of work violates the employees' rights, then that's perfectly doable. It doesn't end up any less fundamental than any other rights. (Being doable doesn't mean that there are no consequences or that it indeed is a good idea. Which is why existing regulations in that direction are much more nuanced and complicated.)
As a side note, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the following:
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
It doesn't mention a specific number of hours, but clearly the idea of limiting the number of working hours an employer can demand from an employee is an important idea.
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In other news today get ready for blue goo:
As people across the globe look forward to longer life expectancies, malignant cancers continue to pose threats to human health. The exploration and development of immunotherapy aims to seek new breakthroughs ...
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
That's the whole point I'm making. Governments aren't the ones who grant rights.
It's not the government who grants those rights. The population of a certain country has essentially granted itself these rights. In most cases, they've become enshrined in laws through various processes. The government has thus been delegated the responsibility to uphold and defend those rights.
Which people from a country? How? Where can I see what the rights are? Where are they written down?
I don't know how you answer those questions without invoking a legislature or some other kind of legislative body. (Especially not if the rights have "become enshrined in laws.") A little bit later in your post, you cite the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you think the body that produced the UDHR isn't a government, I'm not really sure what to say.
For a different example, take the US Constitution. That document doesn't grant any natural law rights. Most of the rights in the US Constitution are actually political or legal rights that exist specific to the US context. For example, parts of the Bill of Rights deal with various rights that someone has when accused of a crime, like the right to an attorney, the right to a quick and speedy trial, and the right to a trial by a jury of your peers.
There's an underlying natural law right to confront your accusers, but most of the specific legal rights listed in the Constitution were picked by Congress as concrete implementations of the natural law right that make sense in the American context.
There are other ways to fairly implement confronting your accuser, but the Framers of those amendments picked that particular implementation.
For another example, the right to keep and bear arms is only meaningful in a society where "arms" exist. In pre-Iron Age societies, where weapons weren't invented yet, the right to keep and bear arms didn't mean anything. The underlying right is the right to self defense, and in the late 18th century when they wrote the Bill of Rights, if you wanted to defend yourself, you needed a firearm.
My suspicion is that most of the rights you're thinking of were granted by government and are enshrined in law are actually political rights that supposedly concretely implement underlying natural law rights.
I'm not sure about @Arantor's argument. I'm mainly responding to your comparison with gravity. There's a very distinct difference. People didn't start to become bound by gravity just because models of it were discovered. But people clearly weren't bound by these rights before their "discovery". Rather, we formulated those rights and are now enforcing them where we can. (Which isn't everywhere, again, unfortunately.)
There is nothing saying that the population can't change the scope or meaning of those rights again. (It's happened before, and it will happen again.) If the population decides that demanding more than 40 hours of work violates the employees' rights, then that's perfectly doable. It doesn't end up any less fundamental than any other rights. (Being doable doesn't mean that there are no consequences or that it indeed is a good idea. Which is why existing regulations in that direction are much more nuanced and complicated.)
Your argument is the same thing as saying there's no such thing as human rights. If they're not universal, there's no reason for me to think of my enemies as having human rights and having their rights constrain my actions.
As a side note, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the following:
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
It doesn't mention a specific number of hours, but clearly the idea of limiting the number of working hours an employer can demand from an employee is an important idea.
As noted before, a government wrote this, so unless you're arguing that rights come from governments, I don't know what you're talking about.
Substantively, though, there's not actually the natural law right to paid holiday leave from a job because there's not a natural law right to having a job in the first place.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
there's not actually the natural law right to paid holiday leave from a job
If there were, my rights would be being violated. As a contractor, I get paid a rather nice hourly rate, but if I'm not on the clock, I don't get paid. Period. It's all billable hours. The timekeeping/payroll system simply has no concept of any payment for hours (or expenses) that get billed to the client. No paid holidays. No paid vacation. No paid sick leave. Nada. Even in jurisdictions where (an extremely small amount of) paid sick leave is mandatory, there's simply no provision in the payroll system for taking it.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
It's not the government who grants those rights. The population of a certain country has essentially granted itself these rights. In most cases, they've become enshrined in laws through various processes. The government has thus been delegated the responsibility to uphold and defend those rights.
Another way to put what @GuyWhoKilledBear is getting at, is that people actually agree on what is good and what is evil across cultures. As long as you ask privately, so the guy answering is not bogged down by cultural peer pressure. People generate all kinds of customs and laws, usually in an effort to make a system that keeps the exceptions in line. But the basic good/bad/evil distinction is hardwired.
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@acrow And law being given not to state what's good, but rather to outline what is evil, to enable impartial judgement thereof. We can turn the outline around, to generate the rights, the infringement of which is clearly evil. And these are universal insomuch as the distinction of good and evil is universal.
The universality of good and evil has been proven by some research or other, I think. But I don't have the sources for that, unfortunately.
Whether the sense of good and evil was hardwired in humans by God or Mother Nature, on the other hand, should be discussed in the Garage.
I have my own opinion on the subject, of course, as everybody here knows. But the dictated laws of the forum are what they are. And should be respected as such.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear Before you start getting into
territory, let's deal with something more fundamental.People have inalienable rights. No question.
Can a company? If so, how? Companies are not people (except maybe in a legal technical sense in some jurisdictions), but they are constructs created and regulated by the laws of the land in which they exist.
We've been over that, there is a very long discussion (somewhere here), and @GuyWhoKilledBear 's position is: Companies are not any kind of regulated constructs, they are not even actually a standalone thing, they are just a group of people. These people obviously have all the inalienable rights, regardless if you look at them as a "company" or not.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Another way to put what @GuyWhoKilledBear is getting at, is that people actually agree on what is good and what is evil across cultures. As long as you ask privately, so the guy answering is not bogged down by cultural peer pressure.
No, I must strongly disagree. There are still people around the world that do insist that blasphemy is evil and, therefore, full freedom of speech is not good. And if you go back few centuries, this would also almost completely cover all the "western" world.
I am pretty sure that there are more examples, but none is so glaring as this one.
Of course, to be honest, there is quite big overlap of things considered good and evil (a "Cultural universal"), but the whole discussion in this thread is clearly way out of this area. At the very least, the whole concept of "selling labor" is completely meaningless in most of the human cultures and alien to them (keep in mind that what we usually image as "culture" is basically just small outlier, about 1% of total number of known cultures - despite being 99.9999% of population).
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
people actually agree on what is good and what is evil across cultures
Or rather I'm sure they don't.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear Before you start getting into
territory, let's deal with something more fundamental.People have inalienable rights. No question.
Can a company? If so, how? Companies are not people (except maybe in a legal technical sense in some jurisdictions), but they are constructs created and regulated by the laws of the land in which they exist.
We've been over that, there is a very long discussion (somewhere here), and @GuyWhoKilledBear 's position is: Companies are not any kind of regulated constructs, they are not even actually a standalone thing, they are just a group of people. These people obviously have all the inalienable rights, regardless if you look at them as a "company" or not.
Side note: I was (and still am) quite puzzled by this, because this concept goes against everything I know about how companies work in capitalism. Especially since it's actually more like how some companies ("coops") work in socialism ... Americans are weird
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Natural law rights came from somewhere. They didn't come from the EU. They can't have, because people already had rights before the EU existed.
No they didn't. They didn't exist before a larger part of society agreed they exist. They didn't exist in the stone age.
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Everyone here seems to agree that human rights are a real thing that exist.
No, you agree with yourself that everyone "agrees" with what you think "natural laws" are. The only thing actually "everyone" agrees (and even that is quite a stretch given your anti-minimum-wage rights) is that these are rights that should exist in every society for it to not be a shitty one. That neither means they do exist universally, nor that this understanding was handed out by someone else other than humans.
Yet nobody seriously takes an Oðinist view.
Good thing nobody takes the Christian view seriously, either, except some crazies. Unfortunately, a whole lot of crazies take an Islamist view seriously, which is even more heinous.
Either way it doesn't matter, as all these gods are a human creation, and thus by the transitive property whether or not they "invented" those rights, it's still man made.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in In other news today...:
No, I must strongly disagree. There are still people around the world that do insist that blasphemy is evil and, therefore, full freedom of speech is not good. And if you go back few centuries, this would also almost completely cover all the "western" world.
There's a distinction to be made here. What is considered to be blasphemy, that is what people consider the highest authority in their life, varies. But most people do still consider blasphemy in itself to be evil.
It's not really limited to official religions. For example, we've seen some politicians basically condemn speech contradicting the statements of the CDC as basically blasphemy.
But whether blasphemy should be punished by an earthly court is another matter.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
It's not a perfect analogy because it was a jokey shitpost that amounts to "lol vegans are going to hell".
Well you know
methe regulars here, there's nothing like taking a shit joke and tearing it to shred with pointless bickering anding 
(although that one went rather the other way (but that isn't unusual either here), you came into a serious (?) discussion with what you intended to be a joke, so it's no surprise that it was discussed seriously)
When someone tells you that they're a vegan, what they mean to imply is that they don't use any animal products at all. That might not be true of the particular vegan you're talking to, but that's what they want you to think.
At this point I'm gonna leave you have fun with your
.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
But most people do still consider blasphemy in itself to be evil.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Natural law rights came from somewhere. They didn't come from the EU. They can't have, because people already had rights before the EU existed.
Now that's really egregious strawman, because EU is obviously not part of the argument at all. It's generic "government" (let's put aside that EU itself is not sovereign and its power is solely a delegation of the 27 sovereign governments). And governments existed before and "granted" various rights way before EU. And way before the whole concept of natural rights...
Of course, you firmly hold the philosophical concept that these natural rights are, well, natural (God-given) and like other laws of nature they are merely discovered. Government can then just officially recognize them and, what is more important, declare its dedication to uphold and even enforce these rights.
IMHO this is just a philosophical/legalistic sophistry with absolutely no practical difference. In practice, it's important that the someone actually enforces the right, otherwise it's just like I had none.
Of course, it would be different if the God-given rights were actually enforced by the very God (like the laws of physics are). Sadly, that is... not the case.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
But most people do still consider blasphemy in itself to be evil.
I think it a statement that's kind of correct if you define "blasphemy" as "a type of speech that go against the highest authority in your life," which is how I read @acrow's previous post (regardless of whether that highest authority is God, Human Rights or something else).
But then it becomes kind of tautological, as "evil" itself is, broadly, "what goes against the highest authority" so really it's just saying that people, generally speaking, don't take too kindly to those who disagree on a fundamental level with them.
Though the fact that there are always people who disagree with someone on such fundamental levels should be a clear indication that there isn't really any sort of absolute "evil" (or "good")...
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
But most people do still consider blasphemy in itself to be evil.
I think it a statement that's kind of correct if you define "blasphemy" as "a type of speech that go against the highest authority in your life," which is how I read @acrow's previous post (regardless of whether that highest authority is God, Human Rights or something else).
But then it becomes kind of tautological, as "evil" itself is, broadly, "what goes against the highest authority" so really it's just saying that people, generally speaking, don't take too kindly to those who disagree on a fundamental level with them.
Though the fact that there are always people who disagree with someone on such fundamental levels should be a clear indication that there isn't really any sort of absolute "evil" (or "good")...
I am not sure how many people consider that evil instead of just stupid (especially with the whole COVID example). There's quite a distinction.
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@Kamil-Podlesak arguably, non-religious people don't use the word "evil" (that part is probably not too contentious?) but use "stupid" instead.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
But then it becomes kind of tautological, as "evil" itself is, broadly, "what goes against the highest authority"
It would, except for the aforementioned cross-cultural agreement on what is good/evil. Even across religions.
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@Kamil-Podlesak In case of religions, there is the danger of invoking the wrath of the deity. Which turns it from stupidity to danger. But the reality usually boils down to challenging the authority of the priesthood of whomever you're blaspheming against.
In case of the CDC, I'd point to the statements by Fauci where he mourns the blows to the the authority of the CDC by the overturning of the mask mandates in court.
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@acrow tbh and without going into full historical/philosophical mode, I think there are very few things that all cultures across all ages have always thought to be "evil" (regardless of whether they did it or not, which is a different thing).
Perhaps something like "do not kill" but even something as basic/generic is riddled by so many special cases and exceptions ("except if the person did [long list of exceptions that vary by culture]") that I'm not really sure how useful it is as a "common point."
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@remi I'd imagine the following are agreed to by everyone everywhere:
- Murder - Killing unprovokedly for personal gain.
- Theft - Taking the property of another man.
- Breech of contract - Betraying a contract/covenant/marriage that has been formally settled.
"Killing" needs an exception list. But "murder" is a word that I can't imagine a language to not have as a separate noun.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Murder
Is the most obvious one that isn't so straight forward ... let's just draw some recent examples that are considered murder or unlawful killing a human being in one part of the world but are not in others
- Capital punishment - execution by a state agent. Totally lawful done in countries like China but ethically hard to defend as anything but murder
- Abortion - does this need more detail?
- Assisted suicide and the stopping of (medical) care. There is still debate about this in many Western countries and even when the principle is accepted by law it sometimes ends up in court with a murder qualification.
- Self-defense: another grey area where laws diverge and the public or ethics might even go in a different direction but people are legally convicted of murder.
So no, murder is not as clear cut, even on an ethical or philosophical level.
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@acrow Maaaaaaaybe, though if you're looking for universality, all of these are riddled from the start with restrictions on who that "other person" (that you're killing/taking stuff from) is.
I agree that most societies probably think that killing your equal (i.e. someone of your group, and of the same social level) without reason is "evil" but many societies had/have built-in loopholes when the two persons involved are not of similar status (think strangers, slaves, nobles, men/women...). Granted, some of those loopholes are more legal ones than moral ones (e.g. it's not considered a crime but still a bad thing) but I'm not sure it's really universal. The same applies to theft, and maybe also to breech of contract.
(note also that theft/breech of contract can only exist in a society with personal property/contracts and while those seem absolutely obvious in our modern societies, I would check with an historian/ethnographer before assuming these are absolute constant in all societies -- in particular, the question of property in pre-agricultural nomadic societies is afaik not a settled debate)
So I'd be really, really careful before saying that there are really some universal "evil" that absolutely everyone agrees with.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
But "murder" is a word that I can't imagine a language to not have as a separate noun.
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@Luhmann said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
Murder
Is the most obvious one that isn't so straight forward ... let's just draw some recent examples that are considered murder or unlawful killing a human being in one part of the world but are not in others
- Capital punishment - execution by a state agent. Totally lawful done in countries like China but ethically hard to defend as anything but murder
Most people agree that certain deeds are worthy of death. Like, 99% of people agree that Hitler would have needed to die if he hadn't pre-empted that himself.
As the Bible states "his blood is on himself"; the distinction comes from the deeds of the one who is sentenced to death.Yes, many people claim that capital punishment is equal to murder. Usually right up until you bring them the cases of some of the worst people history has to offer. Then "there are exceptions, obviously". Well, yes, we call those exceptions "capital punishment".
- Abortion - does this need more detail?
It's not the killing that people argue about. But rather where life begins.
99%, again, agree that killing a full-term child is evil. But are undecided where between the egg-cell and the birth does it turn into a "human".- Assisted suicide and the stopping of (medical) care. There is still debate about this in many Western countries and even when the principle is accepted by law it sometimes ends up in court with a murder qualification.
Now you've actually found a hard one.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that terminal care patients should have unlimited access to Morphine. As much as they could possible want, a button-press away. Everything else is just the government tring to save money on hospitals again.
- Self-defense: another grey area where laws diverge and the public or ethics might even go in a different direction but people are legally convicted of murder.
You said it yourself. People are convicted of murder, by dictation of law and custom. But ethically, people agree that self-defense is allowed, universally. Just as I claimed.
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This thread needs more utilitarian ethics, trolley problems and prisoner's dilemmas to test them on.
Seriously, deriving ethics ab initio is really hard.
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@aitap Like I've said earlier (in a Garage thread, yesterday-ish), philosophy is bad grounds for building your life on. Moral codes work better.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Your argument is the same thing as saying there's no such thing as human rights. If they're not universal, there's no reason for me to think of my enemies as having human rights and having their rights constrain my actions.
They're not universal (even if we'd like them to be). Doesn't mean they don't exist. There are two ways of looking at this:
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I am a member of a group of people that supports a set of rights for everybody. The deal is that if somebody violates those rights, they are sanctioned by the group. This works because enough people think that being part of that group is advantageous to them, even if it (in a sense) restricts what they can do.
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I will treat my enemies (and everybody else) the same way I would want to be treated by them (and make sure that this is known). The hope is that everybody else will reciprocate. (They might not, and that would be where I would apply a term like "evil".)
As noted before, a government wrote this, so unless you're arguing that rights come from governments, I don't know what you're talking about.
You're putting some sort of magical status into the idea of a government. A government is made from people. A good one represents many of its people, a bad one doesn't. People delegate some roles to the government, so the people don't have to bother about them as often. Anything that "comes from the government" ultimately comes from the people it represents.
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Everything is made by, or interpreted, by fallible beings, whose intent or interpretation of that intent is suspect, and ratified by popular agreement.
And the organisational areas we made for ourselves (“countries”) were done so by the few for the many, by violating someones’ rights somewhere (because wars happened over the boundary lines).
And the organisational groups that “run” the countries trample to more or less degree every day over “inalienable” rights. And they do it to other countries’ people too, every damn day.
All I did was observe one of the groups of countries and the “infringements” they place in what they feel is a reasonable set of protections so the employees can go enjoy “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” without the implicit-but-unspecified “work every hour or else no promotion” that can and does happen and is undoubtedly an infringement in its own way on what should be unalienable rights, but since they’re infringed everywhere anyway, what’s one more infringement?
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
@aitap Like I've said earlier (in a Garage thread, yesterday-ish), philosophy is bad grounds for building your life on. Moral codes work better.
That's just code for "I want to defer reasoning to a higher entity, which cannot be questioned". Something you'd find abhorrent if that entity was "government" due to the "cannot be questioned" part.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Inalienable rights come from God, not from whichever EU functionary has to approve of promotion practices at ostensibly private businesses.
In fact, one of the inalienable rights is the right to own property and specifically to trade your labor for property at a mutually agreeable exchange rate.Oðin says that the only work I need perform to own something is to murder the previous owner. God as god, right?
Good thing Oðin isn't the one handing out natural law rights, then, isn't it?
I can't prove to you that gravity exists. I could demonstrate it pretty effectively if we were standing in the same room as each other, but I'm here in NJ and you're off wherever you are.
Yet somehow, if I dropped a pen, everyone reading this knows what would happen.
Everyone here seems to agree that human rights are a real thing that exist. Yet nobody seriously takes an Oðinist view.
I wonder why that is.
Sounds like your definition of a right is "I'll know it when I see it. You won't but I will, so you'd better listen to me". For obvious reasons, I won't be going along with that.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
Another way to put what @GuyWhoKilledBear is getting at, is that people actually agree on what is good and what is evil across cultures. As long as you ask privately, so the guy answering is not bogged down by cultural peer pressure.
No, I must strongly disagree. There are still people around the world that do insist that blasphemy is evil and, therefore, full freedom of speech is not good. And if you go back few centuries, this would also almost completely cover all the "western" world.
I am pretty sure that there are more examples, but none is so glaring as this one.
Well, blasphemy is evil. It's just that preventing people from exercising their natural law right to free expression would be a greater evil. So you can't actually make blasphemy illegal.
Of course, to be honest, there is quite big overlap of things considered good and evil (a "Cultural universal"), but the whole discussion in this thread is clearly way out of this area. At the very least, the whole concept of "selling labor" is completely meaningless in most of the human cultures and alien to them (keep in mind that what we usually image as "culture" is basically just small outlier, about 1% of total number of known cultures - despite being 99.9999% of population).
"Selling" implies that you're trading your labor specifically for money. But if you're bartering it for food or shelter? Pretty sure most ancient cultures had some form of that.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
@aitap Like I've said earlier (in a Garage thread, yesterday-ish), philosophy is bad grounds for building your life on. Moral codes work better.
That's just code for "I want to defer reasoning to a higher entity, which cannot be questioned". Something you'd find abhorrent if that entity was "government" due to the "cannot be questioned" part.
Not necessarily. I've seen plenty of people work off man-made moral codes. Samurais, taoists, etc.. And most of the time they work well.
The main difference to a philosophical starting point is that the moral codes tend to start from excluding the clearly evil acts with simple rules, and then continuing on to define how you should act when you see someone else do wrong.
Whereas philosophical systems assume a spherical man in a conscienceless vacuum, and works toward absolutes from there. With the results usually being absurd, as per @aitap 's link above.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
"Killing" needs an exception list. But "murder" is a word that I can't imagine a language to not have as a separate noun.
"murder" is a legal term. Really, it's just killing with the exception list built in.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Natural law rights came from somewhere. They didn't come from the EU. They can't have, because people already had rights before the EU existed.
No they didn't. They didn't exist before a larger part of society agreed they exist. They didn't exist in the stone age.
Sure they did. Stone age governments didn't recognize or protect them, because stone age governments mostly didn't exist.
But again, that's like saying that Chinese Muslims don't have rights because they're in concentration camps. They have the rights, it's just that their government is preventing them from exercising the rights because their government is evil.
If Chinese Muslims weren't entitled to rights, it wouldn't be evil to keep them in concentration camps.
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
Everyone here seems to agree that human rights are a real thing that exist.
No, you agree with yourself that everyone "agrees" with what you think "natural laws" are. The only thing actually "everyone" agrees (and even that is quite a stretch given your anti-minimum-wage rights) is that these are rights that should exist in every society for it to not be a shitty one. That neither means they do exist universally, nor that this understanding was handed out by someone else other than humans.
As it so happens, I'm also arguing that the degree to which a society fails to protect its people's rights is proportional to how shitty the society is.
The ChiCom government takes a vastly different view of human rights as they relate to Muslim concentration camps than you and I do. If rights aren't universal, who are we to tell them that they're wrong?
Hell, you and I disagree on whether the minimum wage is actually a human right. What basis do you have for saying that the minimum wage is a human right? What basis do you have for saying anyone is wrong about any conception of rights?
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
"Killing" needs an exception list. But "murder" is a word that I can't imagine a language to not have as a separate noun.
"murder" is a legal term. Really, it's just killing with the exception list built in.
And? It's still an important distinction, for it marks the morality of the action. And the legal consequences thereof, but that's besides the point. For we're discussing the universality of good and evil. And it is rather universally agreed that murder is evil.
It is not a new concept. Ancient Hebrew had those different words. As did Greek, AFAIK.
@remi mentioned above that there are systems where it is not seen as a murder if the deceased was a slave etc.. But for me that rather affirms the universality; you need to de-humanize the victim to make a murder anything but murder.
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