Eating intelligent humanoids: Evil?

[Riffington]

Because violating a body is not evil or good in D&D, so there isn't a problem with it.


You are harming them by making it harder for them to be raised.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

i said that would be fine. If you kill somebody and then eat them, or kill them in an eating like method for reasons unrealated to food its ok. Because violating a body is not evil or good in D&D, so there isn't a problem with it. A mind flayer who eats the brains of attacking goblins is fine, as long as his reason for killing them was to protect himself and others, not eat their brains
from
EEBoopit, now I want to play a Mindflayer Paladin. Don't give me ideas.

[EvilElitest]

Boopit, now I want to play a Mindflayer Paladin. Don't give me ideas.

hmmmmm, that actually could be really cool. I was going do a mindflayer cleric of Illmatr but hey
from
EE

[Calinero]

I don't think that there is anything inherently evil about eating a dead body in a D&D setting, other than the fact that you are preventing a resurrection from being possible on the person/creature you are eating. I think the motives for the killing of the person/creature are much more important.

Killing to eat? If it can be avoided, then I would say it's evil. But if they have no other option than to kill a humanoid and eat them, then it's just survival.

Killing for fun, then eating? Killing for fun is evil.

Killing out of necessity, then eating? Not evil.

[Who_Da_Halfling]

Boopit, now I want to play a Mindflayer Paladin. Don't give me ideas.

Having read this thread, I also now want to make a Necromancer who raises Undead and only uses them for good...just to prove to people that raising Undead is not inherently Evil.

-JM

[Asbestos]

Boopit, now I want to play a Mindflayer Paladin. Don't give me ideas.

He'd be darn busy, I mean, most Paladin's just go out and slay evil because they 'have' to and its the 'right' thing to do. This guy would need to just to eat! I can't imagine him having much downtime between adventures.

"Come on, guys! Let's go fight some evil! I'M STARVING!!!"

[Riffington]

Having read this thread, I also now want to make a Necromancer who raises Undead and only uses them for good...just to prove to people that raising Undead is not inherently Evil.

-JM

I hope your long-term plan is to have him use them for evil.
:smalltongue:

[hamishspence]

Depends if you use the Corruption Rating system from Fiendish Codex 2, which says: Whatever your alignment, Lawful characters with this much unatoned-for evil acts go to Nine Hells after death.

If you treat casting Evil-descriptor spells as something that won't change your alignment, if you commit enough Good acts as well, it would work. It is after all, bottom of the list of Corrupt acts.

[monty]

Depends if you use the Corruption Rating system from Fiendish Codex 2, which says: Whatever your alignment, Lawful characters with this much unatoned-for evil acts go to Nine Hells after death.

If you treat casting Evil-descriptor spells as something that won't change your alignment, if you commit enough Good acts as well, it would work. It is after all, bottom of the list of Corrupt acts.

I never really thought casting evil spells should affect you. If spells themselves count, rather than their use, you could just sit there casting Summon Monster over and over for a few days, summoning Good creatures, to neutralize any evil acts.

[The Glyphstone]

He'd be darn busy, I mean, most Paladin's just go out and slay evil because they 'have' to and its the 'right' thing to do. This guy would need to just to eat! I can't imagine him having much downtime between adventures.

"Come on, guys! Let's go fight some evil! I'M STARVING!!!"

Lords of Madness, I think, says their minimum diet is 1 brain/month, the mindflayer equivalent of bread and water. So that's the maximum time he could spend between adventures.

[hamishspence]

Sorry, but doesn't work that way:

P30: FC 2
"Adhering to a lawful alignment is no picnic. According to the terms of the Pact primeval, as negotiated between Asmodeus and the lawful deities, the good that mortals do in life is outweighed by the taint of sin. For game purposes, each act of evil that a PC commits adds to his corruption rating. Any lawful character who dies with a corruption rating of 9 or higher, goes to Baator, no matter how many orphans he rescued or minions of evil he vanquished in life"

Sucks to be lawful, doesn't it?

As for Chaotic mortals, there is a list of obesiant acts, must that sidebar isn't detailed as much. You could extrapolate from it, but might prefer not to.

[EvilElitest]

He'd be darn busy, I mean, most Paladin's just go out and slay evil because they 'have' to and its the 'right' thing to do. This guy would need to just to eat! I can't imagine him having much downtime between adventures.

"Come on, guys! Let's go fight some evil! I'M STARVING!!!"

Wow, no retirement for this guy go. Damn, being good is tough
from
EE

[Devils_Advocate]

(My apologies for once again putting off replying to this for so long. These complex issues take time to address in sufficient detail.)

So, I guess that no one else is going to actually try to argue for the position that intelligent beings have special moral rights (instead of just making unsupported assertions). Fine, leave it to me to address both sides of this argument.

A Higher Level of Consciousness

So, you spear a worm on a hook and cast it out into the water. Time passes, and eventually, you feel a pull on the line. You reel it in, and on stuck on that hook there is now a fish, flopping around, gasping for water, with a sharp piece of metal stuck through its mouth.

Isn't that sort of mean?

Well, maybe so. But consider: That fish has a far less sophisticated nervous system than you do. How much pain, and fear, and suffering, is it actually experiencing compared to what a human would go through if you poked a sharp piece of metal through her? Are not the fish's feelings vanishingly small, compared to a human's? Could one not persuasively argue that the fish's negative feelings about this situation are vanishingly small compared to your own satisfaction at having caught the fish?

One could make a case for that. Here's the thing, though: That argument works both ways.

An illithid stuns a human being and tears the brain out of his skull. That brain then passes into a cognitive, self-aware digestive system that allows the illithid to "taste" the brain with senses incomprehensibly more refined than those of any mere human. It experiences the brain's enzymes, hormones, and even psychic energy in a way that conveys a great deal of information about the victim's unique psychology. The illithid's advanced alien mind ponders and reflects upon the experience using concepts that you're not event capable of grasping.

Are not these experiences, these thoughts, these feelings, unimaginably more than any mental process undertaken by any mere human mind? Are not human feelings, by comparison, vanishingly small?

If this is not true of illithids themselves, what about an elder brain's feelings of satisfaction at the accomplishments of its illithids? Surely human mental experiences are vanishingly small next to those.

At the very high end of the scale, there's, say, Boccob. He has an Intelligence score of 50. He sees, hears, feels, and smells everything in a 17 mile radius. He senses all uses of magic and all predictions -- about anything -- 17 weeks before they happen. His origins are lost in the mists of time, and he will endure indefinitely into the future.

So, Boccob's existence as a thinking being is so much more than yours that if you inconvenience him, he's pretty much justified in crushing you like a bug, right? That's the right thing for him to do. His interactions with mortals only impact his alignment to the extent that his choices impact so many mortals for so long that this actually starts to balance out how very far below him they are individually.

Heck, even beyond that, let's suppose that somewhere in our galaxy, there's some collection of jupiter brains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Brain) so astoundingly mentally advanced that they use minds comparable to ours as low-level subroutines in their thought processes. And let's suppose that they sent out a colonization wave at nearly the speed of light, and when this wave gets to our solar system, it will convert the whole thing into computronium -- matter optimally configured for information processing -- without so much as a "please".

Shouldn't we be overjoyed at that prospect? Wouldn't that be a great thing to have happen? I'm talking about minds so very much more than ours are, you see. They engage in mental processes qualitatively different from and many levels above piddly little things like language and self-awareness and metacognition. So very much farther above these things than these things are above anything done by fish brains.

...

The relevant moral heuristic here is actually rather simple. It's the Golden Meta-Rule: "Treat your inferiors as you would have your superiors treat you, and treat your superiors as you would have your inferiors treat you." Just as you are willing to exploit those below you, you should be willing to yield to those above; and just as you would have mercy from those above you, you should grant mercy to those below you.

No doubt some will claim that creatures only even begin to experience morally relevant mental phenomena at near human levels of intelligence. I find this to be a remarkably suspicious claim. It certainly looks fairly self-serving, and I really see no reason to believe it.

And frankly, how much do you really know about other creatures' mental lives? It's not like you're capable of telepathically reading their minds. A lot of people seem to draw conclusions on this subject based largely on speculation. This is worrying, because we should attempt to avoid behavior that even might cause significant harm to others. If one does not take that approach, one is likely to actually cause significant harm, sooner or later.

Occasionally I see claims regarding this matter that are just completely backwards. Like "You can't have awareness without self-awareness" or "In order to suffer, you must be aware that you are suffering." Man what? You need both awareness and a concept of self in order to turn the former on the latter. Suffering has to exist for you to be able to be aware of it. Basic cognition contains the prerequisites and foundation for metacognition, not the other way around. It's being able to think that lets you think about thinking, not vice versa. Statements like these suggest to me a complete lack of understanding of what one is speaking of.

So, illithids arguably aren't Evil for eating human brains. Rather, what makes them Evil is that they're quite willing to scheme against other illithids! They don't care about other individual mind flayers, just about mind flayer culture and society and civilization. They don't look at dragons and see intellectual peers, they look at dragons and think "That thing's brain must be damn tasty." They may feel very annoyed at the difficulty of obtaining dragon brains to eat.

Funny thing, though: Sustaining an Evil being so it can go on doing Evil is sort of Evil in itself. And I really don't see how it becomes any less so when the Evil being in question is you. Which means that it's still Evil for a mind flayer to eat your brain. It's just that the illithid being Evil makes it eating your brain Evil, instead of eating your brain being Evil making the illithid Evil.


On the "Int 3 Makes It Okay" bit from way hella early in the thread: If I use ray of stupidity to knock someone's Intelligence below 3, does that make them edible?
More specifically, is a feebleminded human entitled to better treatment than an animal, and if so, why? The human is, if anything, less intelligent and self-aware than the animal, possessing Int and Cha scores of only 1. Those mental abilities can be brought back up again with a spell, true; but animals can also have their Int and Cha scores raised by a spell (awaken).

Of course, lowering someone's intelligence without just cause is surely Evil to start with. But one could easily have to deal with someone feebleminded by someone else.

For anyone who thinks that desecrating human corpses is wrong but killing animals isn't, this one should be easy, since they already think that former sapience counts for more than current sentience. That doesn't seem to be a Good perspective, but it is consistent.


I can identify Mount Everest, and also real-world morality.
Oh, you can identify "real-world morality" as something in particular? Oh, goody! Would you kindly do so?


It's a trick question. It turns out that only beings with an innate understanding of good and evil (such as humans) are capable of acting morally or immorally.
Well, sure. Only beings with moral values make their choices with moral considerations. Just like only beings with fuzzle values make their choices with fuzzle considerations. It turns out that only beings with an innate sense of fuzzleness (like Tralfamadorians) are capable of acting fuzzly or unfuzzly. And maybe they decide that they're fine with enslaving humans, but not other Tralfamadorians, because Tralfamadorians are fuzzle but we're not.

But it doesn't seem like either morality or fuzzleness is privileged by the universe itself. Indeed, it's unclear what that would even mean.


Dolphins (or giant squid) may be intelligent, but morality does not describe them.
Are you quite sure of that?


Still, while the meaning of a particular verbal statement may be ambiguous, each meaning can be true or false.
Oversimplification. Someone can use the word "sound" without even thinking about how a sensory experience that occurs in the mind is separate from though related to the corresponding physical action in the outside world. The person in question may not even have given the matter enough thought to have made the distinction. I wouldn't describe that situation by saying that they don't mean anything by "sound"... More like, they don't mean enough by it for some purposes. Though it's still plenty for most purposes. And maybe "sound waves" is still too vague a term/concept for some purposes...

See, it's not just ambiguous, given a speaker's words, what he's trying to communicate. It can be quite ambiguous how thoughts correspond to possible arrangements of reality. A concept may not just correspond to a single set of referents, it may correspond to several possible sets of referents, and in order to answer some questions, one may have to choose which set.



So let's simply assume we can actually understand one another's language, and if it turns out we're mistaken we'll fix the mistakes when they become evident.
Unless I'm gravely mistaken, I've repeatedly asked you to to explain what you're actually talking about when you use moral terms, and clarification has not been forthcoming.

And no, I don't understand what you mean when you use such terms. My suspicion is that you don't actually mean anything terribly specific, but I'm open to evidence to the contrary. It's up to you to supply such evidence, of course.


To reference your example: you and I know very well that by Buffalo, I meant Buffalo, New York. Theoretically I could have meant Buffalo, Montana... but I didn't, and you knew it.
I was like 90% sure.


The theoretical problems of language are not as big a deal in practice.
My ass. Something like ninety percent of philosophical arguments seem to boil down to semantic disputes, usually without the participants acknowledging this.


It could tell me what my classification heuristic would be likely to call good (it's not a deterministic algorithm), and it could do the same for Fred. But it could also tell me what is Good.
The meaning of "tell me what is good" is clearly dependent on the meaning of "good".


It could tell me what height I think Everest is, and what height Fred thinks Everest is. And it could tell me what height Everest actually is.
That's because there's a single, actual, physical object that corresponds to your concept of Everest (which in turn corresponds to your use of the word "Everest").


That it ought to offend people.
What, if anything, does that mean?


If we continue to study them, and discover that they really have a sense of morality (as opposed to some habits that sorta-kinda look like it), then this would be a very meaningful finding. We would be obligated to significantly change our behavior towards them.
What sort of evidence would convince you that someone "really has a sense of morality" (whatever that might mean)?


So either humanity or morality would suffice to require us to treat a being with a special respect.
Require in what sense? And what is this based on? It does not seem at all obvious to me.


Why humanity specifically, to that extent? Is it parochialism: the attitude that, because its our species, it must deserve respect?
Um, as opposed to what? It being total coincidence that some humans regard membership in their own species as sufficient to merit special respect? Like, they could have as easily picked leopards, or something?

I'm sorry, but, uh, DUH? It's clearly a chauvinistic attitude, the question is whether it's justified chauvinism.


You will find many people who can argue rationally against this fact- yet, push comes to shove, their conscience will tell them that their reason has mislead them.
First off, I am skeptical of the veracity of that claim. Evidence?

But secondly and more importantly: So what? Should one not be willing to follow one's conscience because it is the right thing to do, and willing to defy one's conscience for precisely the same reason?

It is counterintuitive to me that the series 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - ... sums to pi/4, because it doesn't have any readily apparent connection to circles. Nevertheless, if I see a chain of inference that relates it to circles, I will be willing to accept that my intuition on the matter was incorrect.

What is conscience, if not moral intuition? Do you have any reason to believe that your moral intuition is any better than my mathematical intuition? If so, what?

More importantly, do you have any reason to believe that your moral intuition is more reliable than logic, or even empirical data? If not, then you should reject it if and when it is in disagreement with these things.


I cannot give you a reasoned argument for why this should be so without referencing religious texts...
Couldn't you just state the relevant ideas without referencing the texts? Unless you wanted to argue from authority.


I am very skeptical of intuitions that are not grounded in experience.
Have you any particular justification for being less skeptical of intuitions that are grounded in experience?


Kant incorrectly puts morality in the a priori category of knowledge rather than the a posteriori category.
Do you maintain that all moral knowledge belongs in the the a posteriori category? I don't see how one could reason to moral conclusions without moral assumptions.


Peter Singer extends Mill's work and "proves" that we really should treat cats with more respect as we treat an unintelligent human. While it is obvious that Singer is wrong, I can't prove it by logic alone. If you can, I'd be delighted.
If you want your value system to attach special value to humans, you can just include that in the axioms. If you want it to be a conclusion rather than a premise, then you can work backwards to come up with axioms that lead to that conclusion.

But it strikes me as highly implausible that special valuation of humans in particular would just fall out of a value system not designed with anything like that in mind. Why on Earth would one expect that?

You can hard-code lower status for women, foreigners, members of different ethnic groups, members of other faiths, children, etc., too, of course. It's not just limited to non-humans.


If it is subjective you can define where the line is once and for all, not have to think about it, and justify all manner of acts. If it is objective and you are a bit unsure where the line is, then you have to keep yourself humble.
But is it sufficiently humble to keep one's mind open to the possibility that one's moral beliefs are incorrect?

Suppose that one says "Perhaps I could be persuaded that slavery is evil, but I do not believe it to be so; therefore I will not give up my slaves." And another says "I am not yet convinced that slavery is evil, but I am quite convinced that it is not good; therefore I shall free my slaves."

Is not the latter more virtuous, not only in this particular choice, but in his approach to coping with moral uncertainty? It seems clear to me that if something is ambiguously evil, but not even ambiguously good, then one should avoid said thing if one wishes to avoid evil.

It's different, of course, if you have reason to suspect that slavery is good.

Given that you describe a rather questionable moral belief as a "fact" of which you are "certain", I must question just how humble you are. But if you aspire to greater humility, I would not call you a hypocrite. We often fall short of our own ideals; that's quite different from a dubious double standard.


Eating intelligent humanoids is not evil.

Killing intelligent humanoids is not evil.

Murdering them is evil.

The distinction between murder and killing is a fairly simple distinction, though people like to make it difficult. It is a killing if they represent a real and present threat to yourself or your community, and are able to defend themselves. It is a murder if you kill those who do not represent a threat to your community, or are unable to defend themselves.
So, it's not evil to kill to defend yourself or your community, but killing to defend other individuals or communities is evil? I disagree; Good is not self-centered.


D&D (at least 3E where it matters) counts mindflayer's eating habits as evil
Is this actually made explicit anywhere?

I had sort of gathered that it was understood that morally Neutral intelligent creatures like slaadi, wyverns, chaos beasts, phase spiders, lizardfolk, etc. etc. etc. may very well try to kill your character extremely dead and feed on his delicious corpse. The decriptions of evil creatures tend to make a point of how they're downright mean, not just ruthless. Destrachans and kobolds are explicitly descibed as sadistic, gnolls prefer intelligent prey because they scream more, etc.

Now, that's rather inconsistent with the actual alignment section of the PHB, which says that only some evil creatures do evil for the sake of evil, while others merely lack compassion. But that should come as no surprise; if you've been paying attention, you've surely already gathered that D&D is hardly consistent about alignment.

[Riffington]

Funny thing, though: Sustaining an Evil being so it can go on doing Evil is sort of Evil in itself. And I really don't see how it becomes any less so when the Evil being in question is you. Which means that it's still Evil for a mind flayer to eat your brain. It's just that the illithid being Evil makes it eating your brain Evil, instead of eating your brain being Evil making the illithid Evil.


Do you mean specifically in order that it can go on doing evil? Or sustaining someone evil, which incidentally helps it go on doing evil?




Oh, you can identify "real-world morality" as something in particular? Oh, goody! Would you kindly do so?

Sure. Just from today: I let another resident do one of my interesting cases today, because she specifically needed the neuro experience. That was good. I also listened to gossip today. That was evil.

If you were looking for an actual heuristic... many have been written, and are far better than what I can write here.



Well, sure. Only beings with moral values make their choices with moral considerations. Just like only beings with fuzzle values make their choices with fuzzle considerations.

I can't really comment much on fuzzality. But I can certainly tell you that if you made my computer print something mean about my mother I would get mad at *you*, not my computer. Because my computer may be showing me the message, but it's not a moral actor. You are.



Are you quite sure of that?

As sure as I am about anything else...



Unless I'm gravely mistaken, I've repeatedly asked you to to explain what you're actually talking about when you use moral terms, and clarification has not been forthcoming.


And I've repeatedly refused to reduce morality to a mere definition. When we talk about you, it is not helped by first defining "you". Are we including only the cells with a specific DNA sequence? Only live ones? Also those with mutations? Also bacteria? In fact, any given definition will be less useful than our current understandings of what "you" include - even if our understandings are slightly different.



What, if anything, does that mean?


I will quote from The Abolition of Man
"Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more 'just' or 'ordinate' or 'appropriate' to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions."




But secondly and more importantly: So what? Should one not be willing to follow one's conscience because it is the right thing to do, and willing to defy one's conscience for precisely the same reason?

One should be very cautious in doing so: when they disagree, one's conscience is often more reliable than one's reason.



What is conscience, if not moral intuition? Do you have any reason to believe that your moral intuition is any better than my mathematical intuition? If so, what?

I think that your conscience is more analogous to a sense (like vision or proprioception) than to an intuition. I'm not 100% sure on this, but it makes the most sense to me.



More importantly, do you have any reason to believe that your moral intuition is more reliable than logic, or even empirical data?

Yes. Mere logic was easily bent to the support of slavery, the Inquisitions, the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, etc. Yet in each generation, peoples' consciences told them these were wrong. Those who were best at rationalizing were able to ignore the evidence of their moral sense; I urge you never to do this.



Have you any particular justification for being less skeptical of intuitions that are grounded in experience?

Simply look at medical ethics. Philosophy students who study medical ethics come to logical-yet-ridiculous conclusions all the time. People (whether priests, social workers, doctors, ethicists, etc) who have spent a great deal of time in a hospital setting tend to have a much firmer grasp on the important moral issues. Their insights are more keen, and their conclusions more useful. Not coincidentally, they come to agree with one another a great deal more.



Do you maintain that all moral knowledge belongs in the the a posteriori category? I don't see how one could reason to moral conclusions without moral assumptions.

I do. And as I've explained, you'll want to base your moral "assumptions" on experience. If they logically lead to bad conclusions, distrust those conclusions even if your logic is airtight.



Is not the latter more virtuous, not only in this particular choice, but in his approach to coping with moral uncertainty? It seems clear to me that if something is ambiguously evil, but not even ambiguously good, then one should avoid said thing if one wishes to avoid evil.

Are you going to join me in my vegetarianism then?

[Devils_Advocate]

Do you mean specifically in order that it can go on doing evil? Or sustaining someone evil, which incidentally helps it go on doing evil?
Well, I sort of meant that when an illithid feeds, it's gonna be glad that this allows it to go on doing various evil things, amongst other stuff. I wouldn't call that an unintended consequence of the action.

If you're asking whether I think we're morally responsible for foreseeable consequences of our actions even if those consequences aren't specifically intended: Yes, I do.

If you're asking whether I think that the foreseeable but unintended consequences of an action can make it Evil in the D&D alignment system: It's not clear to me whether the rules are even consistent on this point. I would prefer an answer of yes: E.g. If you steal the sacred artifact protecting a city from hordes of rampaging monsters so you can hock it for huge piles o' bling, that's not non-Evil just because the slaughter of all those peaceful villagers was a side-effect of your action instead of a means to an end. Still, one could perhaps answer no to this question and still run the alignment system in a way that is not completely ridiculous. Perhaps.



If you were looking for an actual heuristic... many have been written, and are far better than what I can write here.
But which of them are "real-world"?


As sure as I am about anything else...
Then you're overconfident. There is no way that you should be assigning that proposition as much certainty as you do to 1 and 2 adding to 3, or even to the moon having more mass than a thimble. I don't even have a good handle yet on what you're talking about when you speak of morality, and I can still state that with confidence, because there is nothing you could plausibly be talking about that would warrant that degree of certainty.

Hmm. Let me ask you a question. Out of all your beliefs, is it possible that there's at least one thing you're one hundred percent certain about, but nevertheless wrong about?


And I've repeatedly refused to reduce morality to a mere definition. When we talk about you, it is not helped by first defining "you". Are we including only the cells with a specific DNA sequence? Only live ones? Also those with mutations? Also bacteria? In fact, any given definition will be less useful than our current understandings of what "you" include - even if our understandings are slightly different.
"The person who posts under the screen name 'Devils_Advocate' on the giantitp message boards" would be quite sufficient to distinguish me from all other humans, and that's plenty specific for many, many purposes. For other purposes, it might be helpful to decide which matter should be considered part of my body, but that specification seems like so much work and so unlikely to be relevant in any emergency that I'm willing to put it off until such time as it is needed. (And should this ever occur, the circumstances warranting such categorization will likely make it fairly clear just which potential categorization might be helpful.)

Can you distinguish your morality from all other the vast majority of moralities? I'm just asking for a "sound waves" level point towards the metaphorical mountain, here. I am not asking for a definition so specific that it's completely unambiguous in every possible case what it covers and what it doesn't. I'm don't think it's even possible to define most concepts that specifically.

Or, if you believe there's One True Morality, perhaps you could describe what it even means for one morality to be the "one true" one.


I will quote from The Abolition of Man
That does not, of course, answer my question.

What does it mean for a given reaction to something to be congruous, or merited, or appropriate, or whatever you want to call it? Synonyms do not clarify, here. At all. Synonyms just help someone to recognize a familiar concept being called by a different name. They're do not help one to understand a foreign concept. That requires the concept to actually be, y'know, described.

This is why I stopped reading that thing halfway into the second chapter. It hadn't even addressed the central issue, and it was pretty obvious that it wasn't going to. It just kept repeating the same nonsense over and over -- at least, nonsense to me, since I hadn't been given any clarification with which to make sense of it.

So, the question stands: Does it actually mean anything to say that some response to a given stimulus is "correct", and if so, what does it mean?

This whole business sounds like the Mind Projection Fallacy (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/mind-projection.html) to me. That is to say, it sounds similar, even if it's not quite the same thing. In fact, it looks to me like it might be the same thing, but on a meta level: that instead of directly considering beauty to be an intrinsic property of a flower, you're considering appropriateness to be an intrinsic property of aesthetic appreciation of the flower. But of course endorsing that aesthetic appreciation is as much a response by your mind as is aesthetic appreciation of the flower itself. So it would still appear to be quite subjective.

Certainly there are cases in which many people will make the same subjective assessment, either of a stimulus or of a response to a stimulus. I suppose that one could deem the majority consensus "right", if one wished to. Is that what you're talking about?


One should be very cautious in doing so: when they disagree, one's conscience is often more reliable than one's reason.
I am quite skeptical of the notion that this holds true for everyone. It strikes me as far more likely that it is true for some, but the opposite is true for others.

I could perhaps be persuaded that the former group is much larger than the latter. I honestly don't put all that much stock in the reasoning abilities of the average person. But then, I don't put all that much stock in the conscience of the average person, either.

I don't put all that much stock in much of anything, really. I'm skeptical like that.


I think that your conscience is more analogous to a sense (like vision or proprioception) than to an intuition. I'm not 100% sure on this, but it makes the most sense to me.
You mean, like a hardwired response to stimuli, basically? Data processed in a preprogrammed way, with the result dumped into the conscious mind?

If that's how conscience works, it doesn't sound like something I should trust. It sounds primitive. In fact, if it's actually on the level of senses, then I'd expect animals to have it too. At least some mammals, anyway.

I'm guessing that maybe that's not what you meant.


Yes. Mere logic was easily bent to the support of slavery, the Inquisitions, the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, etc.
Well, it's true that you can use logic to prove anything, given the right assumptions. (OK, "right" probably isn't the best word, but hopefully you get my meaning.) But avoiding incorrect assumptions seems like a better response to this problem than abandoning logic.

Still, I'll admit that being logical is hardly sufficient to make a belief system correct. An inconsistent system is provably partly wrong, but a consistent system can still be entirely wrong! So if you discover your beliefs to be inconsistent, this should hardly make you eager to discard them in favor of any consistent set of beliefs, as this might mean going from bad to worse.

On the other hand, you shouldn't cling to an internally inconsistent worldview just because others are worse. You should try to figure out just which of your beliefs are wrong. You should have been doing that anyway, really; it's always a pretty safe bet that you're not right about everything.


Yet in each generation, peoples' consciences told them these were wrong.
I suspect that there were also people whose consciences told them that these things were right.


Those who were best at rationalizing were able to ignore the evidence of their moral sense; I urge you never to do this.
When presented with an argument, I almost instinctively try to figure out what's wrong with it. :smalltongue: This works recursively, as each point against an argument is itself an argument, and can lead to some rather extensive mental dialogues. This would seem to make me rather poor at rationalizing. I'm ultimately concerned with getting down to the truth, not supporting any particular position. I gather that this makes me rather unusual, disturbingly.

I do wish to do right, so naturally I want to figure out what the right thing to do is. I see my reasoning abilities as promoting true beliefs more than false ones, so I really don't find my conscience and my rational mind to be in conflict.

I don't think I could blindly ignore my intuition if I tried, and that would probably be a very bad idea anyway. But I certainly don't blindly follow my intuition either.


Simply look at medical ethics. Philosophy students who study medical ethics come to logical-yet-ridiculous conclusions all the time.
Could you give an example?


People (whether priests, social workers, doctors, ethicists, etc) who have spent a great deal of time in a hospital setting tend to have a much firmer grasp on the important moral issues. Their insights are more keen, and their conclusions more useful. Not coincidentally, they come to agree with one another a great deal more.
Do you think that this is due more to having better information, or to experiencing the same emotional responses to the same events?

It sounds a bit like you might be assuming the conclusion, here. Also, as I discussed above, are their conclusions to be considered "appropriate" because there is a consensus? If not, then on what basis?


And as I've explained, you'll want to base your moral "assumptions" on experience. If they logically lead to bad conclusions, distrust those conclusions even if your logic is airtight.
Well, I could say that rejecting a conclusion that logically follows from a given set of assumptions means rejecting at least one of the assumptions. I'm not going to believe something that I know to be a contradiction; I'm not capable of that level of self-deception, and wouldn't want to be.

But it would be oversimplifying to conflate belief with certainty. Actually, I just can't assign the assumptions of a logically valid argument probabilities that multiply to anything greater than the probability I assign the conclusion.


Are you going to join me in my vegetarianism then?
Going to? Dude, I don't eat parts of deceased creatures. (Is it just me, or does that sound downright sensible when phrased that way?)

[monty]

Walls of text burn my eyes!

I thought we beat this dead horse to a pulp already. I'm not sure where the cut-off for necromancy is, but why couldn't we just let this die?

[Riffington]

I'm not sure where the cut-off for necromancy is, but why couldn't we just let this die?

Because Devils_Advocate, hamishspence, and I might want to talk to each other a bit more :p


Well, I sort of meant that when an illithid feeds, it's gonna be glad that this allows it to go on doing various evil things, amongst other stuff.
I want to make sure I understand. You're saying that Illithids are evil because they hurt each other rather than helping each other. But because they are evil, hurting each other is good, and helping each other is evil.
Is this a fair characterization?



Out of all your beliefs, is it possible that there's at least one thing you're one hundred percent certain about, but nevertheless wrong about?

It's not only possible, it's one hundred percent certain :smalltongue:



Can you distinguish your morality from all other the vast majority of moralities?

You mean "my understanding of morality". It turns out that most religions have moved their moral understandings closer and closer to one another, and to morality itself. This makes it harder to distinguish my understanding from theirs, which is... suggestive.



This is why I stopped reading that thing halfway into the second chapter

Instead, I suggest you read the entire book :) But the basic point is:
When I call a waterfall sublime, I am not talking about my feelings (though I may be revealing them). I am talking about the waterfall and human nature.


Could you give an example?
The Swiss group that described the "rights of plants" while rejecting consideration of patenting genes as "irrelevant". Also, Kass.

[TheCountAlucard]

Because Devils_Advocate, hamishspence, and I might want to talk to each other a bit more

Then PM each other. Jeez.

[Who_Da_Halfling]

Then PM each other. Jeez.

Because it's such a burden on all of us to have to scroll past this thread. Because the larger threads are, the longer it takes to scroll past them without reading them. Right....

I don't have nearly the level of philosophical knowledge that any of them have, but I find their arguments fascinating and I like reading them. Part of why I never liked reading philosophy despite my enjoyment of logical argument is that the writings of most philosophers are dreadfully dull, dry, and difficult to get through, at least for me. The posts here, however, are largely clear, concise, and accessible. Hence, enjoyment for me, even as a bystander rather than as a participant.

Please continue. I'm still not sure if my altruistic Necromancer is going to have serious alignment issues or not :-) (although I suspect that will come down to my DM's interpretation of alignment rather than mine).

-JM

[Oracle_Hunter]

This is a thrice-raised thread. Someone get Van Helsing, we need to dust this sucker! :smalltongue:

[hamishspence]

the question is, if creature will slowly but surely die of malnutrition if it doesn't eat intelligent beings, is killing to survive evil? How about murdering to survive?

Its the classic Vampire dilemma all over again- some fictional vampires (not all) cannot survive for long without a steady diet of human blood.

The Mind flayer is this, with the requirement of draining prey to death added (some vampire stories do have young vampires being unable to control their draining)

So, to avoid being evil, would the mind flayer have to use its power only in battle, in circumstances where killing the opponent would be considered the "right" thing to do? After all, when only quick way of defeating an opponent is to brain-suck them, it might not seem so malevolent.

[kopout]

See I've never had a problem with necromancy. It may be repugnant and kinda creepy, but I've never really thought that it necessitates that you be evil to do it. Most of the D&D world would tend to disagree with me on that I think.

I on the other hand agree

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff of Moddingham: Seriously people, keep up with the posting or let it die. I'm going to let this one ride, but if it lapses to thread necromancy again, I'm going to have to put it down for good.