Only if you can prove that chickens and other animals will not eventually be given the same rights as chimps. Which you have not done.
Wow! Do you truly not understand logic at all? Logic is a formal progression of thought. For example, if all trees are green, it must follow that the tree down the street from me is green. Since I can prove the tree down the street from me is not green, I have disproven the original assertion. That is logic. The assertion that if one thing happens in the future, something else will happen in the future is not true in and of itself. That is not to say that it cannot be true, but that particular relationship does not support that conclusion. For example, if we paint all trees in the world green, others will think it is a good idea and paint all rocks green. The former event in no way provides support for the latter event and anyone who claims it does is mistaken. I don't have to prove that no one will think it is a good idea or that people won't paint rocks green to show that this is a fallacy.
With that in mind, claiming that chickens will be granted rights if chimps are, is a clear logical fallacy. Maybe the former action does make the latter action more likely, but if it does that needs to be shown by a separate logical assertion. Simply the fact that the two things are similar in no way provides any evidence that such a thing will be the case.
Yet you seem to ignore the agenda of PETA, giving all animals the same rights as humans, and that is not a fallacy, and it proved my statement is not a fallacy either.
You haven't shown that such an agenda is the goal of PETA. The point is, what you presented was a classical logical fallacy. Please educate yourself so that you do not continue to present such sloppy thinking. What do they teach in schools these days?
Refraining from imposing personal morality on the public at large is a theme of the Democrats, and their campaigns. The fact that they do it anyway only shows their character.
Umm, the same is true of the republicans, they just present it slightly differently. I don't think the fact that either party is incredibly deceptive is news to anyone.
I mean, it's no different than Republicans and the pro-life issue. They all pay lip service to ending abortion, yet haven't done anything about it. You can bet that if 1.3 million Americans were being killed each year by terrorism, the Republicans would be doing more than just confirming conservative judges and declaring their support for the cause.
I'd like to think that would depend on if terrorists were only killing 1.3 million Americans who were already brain dead, but sadly it would simply be on based on how many votes an action would get them.
Kind of makes you wonder what they really stand for.
Not really. They stand for amassing personal power and wealth and will support whatever they think will get them the most of it. Republicans don't make speeches about the evils of abortion or homosexuality because they find those things to be repugnant. Many of them are homosexuals or have taken part in deciding an abortion should take place for themselves or their wives or mistresses or girlfriends or daughters. They simply speak about what they think will get them the most votes.
I actually find this preferable to the rare few who are wacky religious zealots bent upon forcing all americans to obey their misguided religious ideals under threat of being thrown in prison and raped.
But moving on, I would go further and say that morality is objective, rather than subjective.
By definition, it is not. Individual morality or a moral consensus is always subjective. Ethics, are objective and rule based. That is the primary difference between the two, which are often misused terms in the English language. For example, according to the rules of ethics, you are responsible for actions you take and which you have not been coerced into performing. According to common morality in the US, stealing possessions from another is wrong. According to other cultures, stealing possessions from another without getting caught might be laudable and right. These are directly in conflict, but that is okay because morality is subjective.
The reason why I believe someone should be granted the full rights of a human being by simply being a member of the species (or instance of, if you will) is that no other standard completely guarantees human rights:
Even that does not guarantee such rights, nor are such rights necessarily sufficient. As a parallel, the US constitution and declaration of independence referred to "all men." Despite that blacks were still denied rights because it was said not to apply to them. It was further used as a reason to deny rights to women, despite the fact that they were just as deserving. That is why I feel using the term "human" is just as insufficient as the term "men."
It is essential that the definition of a human be unalterable...
I do not believe this is possible to accomplish. It has never worked in the past.
If we specify sentience as a criteria, the level at which one is considered human becomes completely arbitrary. Someone of insufficient intelligence or cognitive ability is loved no less by his parents because of this fact.
What does how much someone is loved have to do with it? The fact that an old woman dotes on her cat shows it may not be any less loved than if it were human. The fact that a automobile is no less loved than a bratty human child does not mean a car should be granted rights. A human with insufficient intelligence is probably not capable of taking responsibility for themselves and should not have the right to go anywhere they want or buy a firearm or sell their organs. That is why they are not now granted those rights, but are held in the custody of a guardian who manages those rights for them.
If we specify moral criteria, who defines what "moral ability" is? Again, it becomes completely arbitrary.
I said nothing about moral criteria, nor is intelligence a moral belief. I specified being intelligent and aware enough of a right to take responsibility for that right and accept the consequences thereof.
While racism may now seem repugnant, at the time of its heyday there were logical arguments in its favor. Proponents of racism claimed that other races lacked intelligence or moral uprightness, and hence, were less than fully human. If we want to avoid the error of the past, we would be wise to define humans strictly according to species.
Why? Is it true that only humans are capable of being intelligent or moral? Are all humans intelligent and moral? Being human does not make one worthy of having human rights. I can show you lumps of cells that are technically human, but that does not make them worthy of protection. If I were to use a new genetic technique to change your DNA such that you were technically no longer human, but there were no noticeable changes, does that make you any less deserving of rights? Should I then be free to kill you?
If you specify what criteria qualifies someone as human, you create a situation in which redefinition of that criteria can disenfranchise a whole class of people.
There is either a definition for human or not. Either way you can specify some group as part and some group as not by creating o
I'm trying to cast my net widely to consider all the things people might call a "right". The common element of anything that is a right is that imposes a duty.
Where you're causing confusion is that not all things that impose a duty, are a right. In any case, the article was pretty clear on what type of rights are being discussed. Just look at "human rights watch" or another such organization and you'll find them enumerated.
A right to real property doesn't make sense in a nomadic culture.
Most nomads still own possessions, but certainly the perception of relative rights is different in different cultures.
One culture might be concerned with the womans right not to have children, another more concerned with a womans right to have children as a protection for her old age.
Here I think you're making a mistake. A right is an ability to make a personal decision and is paired with responsibility for that decision. The right to have children and the right to not have children are the same thing. If a woman chooses to have children as a way of getting support in her old age, she has responsibility for raising those children ad if she cannot society should deal with her for imposing a burden upon it. If she chooses not to have children and later in life she has no one to support and visit her, that too was her own choice and she is responsible for the consequences.
Black men and white men aren't really any different; men and women are different, but compared to an elephant or a dolphin they have quite a bit in common. All men (meaning humans) may be self evidently created equal, but it is not necessary to assume chimps are equal to humans to assume they have some rights.
Black men and white men and men and women are different from one another. The thing is, those differences do not have anything to do with the criteria that indicates to our society that they are deserving of human rights. Some genes are different. That does not make them less intelligent or less reasoning or less feeling or less able to take responsibility for themselves. Some of them may not, however fit these criteria. They might be too young or mentally handicapped or completely lacking a brain. The point is whether you are human or not is not relevant to what makes one deserving of rights. An ant may not be deserving of rights. An average human might be. That does not make the difference in species the relevant criteria as demonstrated by my examples of humans that are not deserving. Likewise, a chimp might be deserving of some and the fact that they are a chimp, while it may correlate to some of those factors, is not a reason by itself. You have provided no logical or evidentiary argument to the contrary.
Without discussing whether it is right or wrong, it is certainly not a logical fallacy, as the argument is not based on claiming that it is a logical necessity but that human psychology means that it is easier to convince someone to give a little bit at a time than a large chunk at once.
I don't see that in the original post. It reads, "...first chimps are given human rights, and then cows/bulls, chickens/roosters, pigs, etc. Before you know it the whole animal kingdom is given human rights and then meat is outlawed." I don't see where that speaks to the human psychology of it. Rather it seems an assertion that because chimps are given human rights, eventually meat will be outlawed. This does not follow and I don't see any evidence or even a logical chain of events to imply it would happen.
If someone specifically makes the claim that it logically has to be like that, then yes it would be a logical fallacy...
Review your rules of logic. It is not only a fallacy if someone claims it must happen because of previous events, it is a fallacy to claim that the previous events provide support for the fact that it will happen. This is not so. Assuming chimps are given certain rights, that does not logically provide any evidence in and of itself to support the belief that, chickens will be given human rights.
...at least when I've heard someone use the "slippery slope" it has almost always been backed with claims of being based on empirical data, not logic.
The slippery slope is defined by multiple future events. There can be data that supports both events or linking events, but the fallacy is in claiming one future event will lead to other, similar future events. That is not a logical assumption, despite that fact that many people seem to believe otherwise. Anyone who cites that as support for an argument automatically loses credibility to anyone who understand the rules of logic.
Do you have any proof that's what Vista is doing with the RAM?
No. I have no idea what it is doing with the RAM. The point I was making was you can't just assume that the RAM being reported as in use is the minimum RAM needed by the system, since many OS's do pre-load some commonly used files and programs. In this day and age I'd be a little surprised if Vista was not doing at least some of that, but it is possible. As I said, that's not the point. I'm not saying Vista uses the memory well, I'm just saying the observation about reported RAM usage is not really a useful way to judge it. You need to actually load systems with a given amount of RAM and see how well Vista performs on them and how much RAM usage is reported on systems with different amounts of RAM but which are otherwise identical.
I don't want to count the number of times I saw Win2K users look at the CPU usage on a Linux system and complain that Linux was a resource hog because it was making full use of what it had, even though it would run fine with a whole lot less. Lets not encourage the same mistake with Vista.
The bug in this argument is that we are talking human rights, we are talking about human behavior towards other humans.
Whether you call them "human rights" or "basic rights" or "intelligent, sentient being rights" is not as important as the concept. I think you're conflating basic rights and negotiated agreements. There is no basic right to be rewarded for work. If you do some work as a volunteer you have no right to be paid. If you make an agreement with someone that they pay you for some work, you still have no basic right to be paid, only an agreement that you will be. If you decide to go dig a ditch and no one pays you, your rights have not been violated.
A basic right is something like "freedom of expression" or the "right to live." That is not to say these rights are necessarily something we should recognize for every living being, only that they are potentially something a being has that should be recognized, assuming they take responsibility corresponding to that right. This has nothing to do with an agreement among actors that everyone has these rights, rather they are considered an intrinsic part of our existence.
If we are talking about different species, we are talking about relationships where the actors have very little in common, and the relationship is not mutually voluntary. We'd expect such a relationship to be asymmetrical.
Why does the species have anything to do with it? You could just as easily say that if we're talking about a relationship between a black man and a white man or a man and a woman we'd expect the relationship to be asymmetrical. Or if a serial killer views you as simply prey and a lower order of being, he might consider your life to be worthless. None of that does anything to imply that you don't still have the basic right to live and express yourself so long as that right does not conflict with the rights of others.
I think this sums up the problem in a single sentence. Unless there exists an objective standard of morality (or ethics, if you will) which is independently verifiable, you will always have the problem of differing opinions. Should you find me undeserving of your respect, would that justify murdering me?
Morally, perhaps, but legally no. You see the law is simply the common consensus as to the ethics of the disagreement, as mitigated by the defined rights of the constitution. The will of the people is far from perfect, but it is the best (safest) way to make decisions as a people that we've come up with yet.
So who decides when a human being is considered not a human, from the perspective of the law? The judge? Yes, directly, but he only interprets the law, which is effected by the majority of the voting public.
Actually, this would be a jury of peers, most likely; interpreting the law which theoretically embodies the will of the majority.
The problem is that the law changes. In the 1800's, a Black person didn't count as fully human, simply because of the color of their skin. In the 1930's, Jews were not considered fully human simply because of their ancestry. And this happened in democratic republics. The legal definition of what constituted a human being was capricious, subject to the purely arbitrary whims of the public. If you allow the public to decide who is and isn't human, and consequently, deserving of the protection of law, inevitably the criteria will be changed to benefit those in power.
I disagree. It isn't a problem that the law changes, but a benefit. If the law did not change black people and jews would still not be considered humans by the legal system. Your assertion that the definition will always change to benefit those in power is not well supported by history. Thus far most of the changes to what defines a person have been to the detriment of incumbent powers.
Our society uses terminology to minimize the rights of others. We should not be naive in thinking that if we do not hold to the most basic definition of what a human being is - that is, a member of the human species - that others will modify the definition to disenfranchise those which they despise. Our history is filled with examples of doing just that.
If you try to freeze the law as inflexible in the hopes of preventing things from getting worse, you also stop them from getting better. It does not work. If Union Carbide develops a way to breed beings that are 90% human DNA and have the same brains and feelings, but look a little different should we forever deny these beings human rights and let them be used as slaves out of fear that the definition of "human' could also be changed for the worst? What about artificially intelligent computers? What about extra terrestrials? What about intelligent terrestrial beings like dolphins, who are arguably as intelligent and deserving of life as humans are?
We need to guarantee rights based upon the real criteria upon which they should be based, that is to say the traits that are worthy of those rights, rather than trying to hold to outdated and inaccurate correlative traits out of a fear of change. Whether rights are granted to the human species of to any being with appropriate intelligence and responsibility, powerful people will find ways to take those rights away from subsets of those who should have it. We haven't changed the definition of human, but already large numbers of people you cite yourself are denied those rights. What makes you think preventing deserving beings from having those rights as well will in any way stop that from happening? I think you're way off here.
Thus, he followed a long-standing theme of the Democratic party of not imposing your personal morality on the public.
Actually, I don't think this is true at all. The democrats have favored many policies that imposed personal morality upon the public, from gun control legislation, to anti-pollution laws.
A theme which goes all the way back to President Lincoln (a Republican) who forced his views of morality on the issue of slavery on the entire country with disastrous results. Now, thanks to the Republicans, you can't own slaves anymore.
You slept through your high school history classes, huh? Lincoln was opposed to slavery, but also was against outlawing it as he feared it would create too large of a split between the north and south. It was only the misguided fear that he would outlaw slavery that led to the civil war and then to the emancipation.
That's a popular thing to say. But if no applications are running, what the hell is the OS loading into the RAM that's taking up that space? It should NOT use as much memory as possible, rather, it should use as much memory as necessary.
Okay you boot up some generic desktop OS and the OS has loaded and is functional. Would you rather it:
sit idle and do nothing wasting the unused RAM
pre-load applications and documents you commonly open so that if you do open them they load more quickly and if you don't you've lost nothing
How the hell does percentage of similarity of DNA relate to having a soul?
Yeah, that's just crazy. We all know the souls is coded in one particular gene sequence, present in humans, except lawyers and politicians. Some day we hope to isolate it to cure or at least stop the breeding of these soulless humanoid monsters.
An "OS for the masses" should make it obvious what memory is in active use and what memory is just being used for aggressive caching. The interface should be designed such that my computer illiterate mother-in-law would be able to figure out that for herself.
As an OS for the masses, users shouldn't even need to know what RAM is or how much is being used at a given time. Maybe if performance is really slow it should recommend running fewer programs at a time or buying more RAM. In any case, your implication that Microsoft could put out a less than perfect user interface astounds me. We all know how good they are at user interfaces:)
This is absolutely not true. You have humans rights. You have human responsibilities. These do not depend on each other.
Ethically, they do actually. A person with no rights, ethically has no corresponding responsibilities. Heck even "Spiderman" gets this relationship, "with extraordinary power comes extraordinary responsibility."
You say that every Xeon of this generation needs this type of RAM. You may be correct, but go to NewEgg and buy RAM for a Xeon and then go buy it for a Mac Pro. There is definitely a difference in price. Also it appears that apple has some tight standards.
Okay, on NewEgg medium quality (crucial) RAM for the new Power Mac runs about $80 cheaper for 2 Gb. So if you don't like it, buy your extra RAM on NewEgg. What's the problem? Or were you assuming everyone uses crappy low quality RAM which is probably the number one source of computer crashes, but most people don't ever figure that out.
You imply that you can put in a new(er) Nvidia card in a Mac Pro and it will work. It won't! You cannot put in a 8k series Nvidia card in a Mac Pro and get it to work in OSX.
Umm, most video cards work just fine. I always check before buying one, but I've never, ever had a problem. Some of the cards that are coming out now do not support EFI, and fail back to BIOS compatibility, which may work with Windows, but not OS X (who never used BIOS). In general, however, any video card you buy will work fine.
You have 3 different video cards that will work and be supported on this Macintosh.
Just because Apple only ships 3 from their store does not mean other ones do not work.
... just give me a $4000 machine with a video card that isn't two freaking years old, and no real method of upgrading.
You pull it out and stick another one in. It's not that hard. Macmall.com lists 136 different PCI Express graphics cards compatible with the new Power Mac. If you want to blow $6K on a graphics card, go right ahead. About the only cards that don't work are the Nvidia 5500 series because of some driver problem they haven't worked out yet.
He means it sucks down RAM like its going out of style. I just got a new PC (Core 2 Duo, 2GB Ram, Good video card, Striped RAID 0) and with absolutely nothing running Vista Business sucked up 35-40% of my RAM. Thats sitting still, doing nothing, with nothing running.
This is not a good judge of how much RAM Vista needs. A well designed OS should use as much RAM as possible all the time, even if that RAM is just loading programs the OS thinks you might want to use soon in an effort to speed up their load times. Idle RAM is wasted RAM.
That said, the minimum amount of RAM needed in Vista to have a useful system seems much higher from my own, very brief testing.
All drivers for Vista are lousy. They have serious memory leak issues, and when they start to have problems Vista disables them.
I'll answer this the same way as when talking to Linux advocates. We don't care why so much as what the end result is. Right now Vista sucks because of crappy drivers. In a year or two I expect that to settle down, but for now it would be irresponsible to recommend Vista for some purpose without taking this into account and either selecting hardware to avoid the problem or being prepared to deal with slow performance and crashes. This is probably the number one reason why no consultant in their right mind is willing to recommend a business switch to Vista for the first year or two.
But what about a fetus that has developed a functioning brain and is able to live outside the womb (abiet with medical help)?
Obviously there is a sliding scale of rights and development. A human that never develops more than a rudimentary brain should expect the same rights as an animal with equivalent intelligence and responsibility. Most scientists place adult chimps at about the same cognitive level as a 5 year old human. Until the average human reaches 5 years of age, they should then have similar rights and responsibilities as a chimp, whatever that is determined to be. As for a fetus in an intermediate stage, it depends upon where in the stage that is. For example, humans are legally allowed to put a dog to sleep if they decide it would be inconvenient for their lifestyle. Assuming we don't have a double standard, why should a fetus with an equivalent level of intellect and understanding be treated any differently (note, from what I've read I doubt any unborn baby would reach this level of development).
Now there is room for argument that both dogs and fetuses should be given more protection than they currently have, and that is a valid judgement call, but I've never even once heard any "pro-life" advocate make that argument. All the arguments I have heard deal not with objective opinions about the level of rights a given being should have, but about religious opinions about souls and the inherent superiority of humans.
Personally, as someone who accepts death as an inevitable consequence of life and who values quality of life, I think the current abortion laws in the US make sense and are more than conservative enough to make sure any human with intelligence and awareness approaching that of a chicken are protected unless it is a case of balancing that fetus's rights against that of the mother, who is a fully functioning adult with a defined sense of being. Anything currently legal to abort in the US, is pretty brainless at that point and I see no reason to provide them with extraordinary protections based upon that level of consciousness.
...in hopes that they would finally offer a more "standard" RAM and hopefully a 8k Nvidia card. (This mac uses weird slow RAM that is very expensive
Every machine running this generation of Xeon processors needs the type of RAM Apple uses and calling it "slow" does not really help your credibility here.
I thought it "might" be possible to upgrade the video card myself, but found out you can't do that.
Umm, you can't? Since when? You've been able to swap the video cards in Apple's towers for about 8-10 years now.
It makes little to no sense to me that Apple chose to not use the same freaking graphics cards as a standard PC.
Apple uses standard video cards, but as usual are a little ahead of the curve. Not all cards support EFI yet, since Vista is the first version of Windows to support it on the desktop properly. You're probably one of those people who complained about Apple's nonstandard choice of using USB for keyboards and mice instead of PS/2. Now many years later the bottom end of the PC market is finally catching up but my 8 year old mac is still working fine because they included USB and firewire instead of what was "standard" at the time.
Apple, you almost had a Windows/Linux user switched, but your RAM and Video card selection lost you one.
Personally, I'm glad Apple is forward looking and pushes current standards instead of decade old ones. If they lose a few sales from people who can't wait 6 moths for the Windows crowd to play catch up and for more widespread support from third party vendors, I think it is a small loss.
I do understand (before you explained) but do not agree. I am more in favor of a "do not be unnecessary cruel but do what you need to survive" point of view...
That is not a reason why a given being should have rights and another should not, just a prescribed behavior. Who is to say what is necessary? Is testing pain relievers on animals necessary? How many monkey lives are worth a human life? I see it as a matter of us taking responsibility for what we do, and thus claiming the right and the responsibility for the results.
I don't see how your idea would allow us to determine if a chimp or a artificially intelligent computer or an alien race or a human-animal hybrid created in a lab should have a given right currently granted only to humans by our laws.
As many pointed out, rights go together with responsibilities. Can you hold a chimp responsible for a crime, then?
I think you can hold a chimp responsible for any crime that corresponds to the right/responsibility it has. For example, if chimps have a right to not be killed, then chimps should be held responsible by society when they kill a person or another chimp. If they are not held responsible for this, then they conversely should not be granted that right. Note, rights do not have to be an all or nothing proposal. A chimp might be accorded such a right to life and the accompanying responsibility, but not the right to own property and the accompanying responsibility to pay taxes on it.
Trying to extend what is now human rights to not only apes but all animals (I can see efforts in that direction) leads automatically to paradoxes: animals kill each other all the time, that's the way life is. Believing in so called "animal right to life" implies (in case the person believing in it is consistent and smart, which is seldom the case) automatically that all the predators and omnivores are criminals.
I think this is the slippery slope logical fallacy. Just because chimps are intelligent and reasoning enough to be granted some right, does not imply that fish or rabbits are. Animals, including humans, kill other animals for food and that is part of our nature. As humans we take responsibility for that killing. For example, we have endangered species laws to prevent the extinction of species because of our actions and we have animal cruelty laws to insure that animals do not suffer unnecessarily in the process. We have judged that our right to kill is more important than some other animal's right to live. That does not mean this holds true for all animals.
Imagine, for example, a geneticist managed to cross a human with a cow. Our laws make it legal to kill and eat a cow or other non-human animal. They make it illegal to kill and eat a human in most cases. Ethically is it okay to kill and eat the hybrid? Legally is it okay to kill and eat the hybrid? Technically it is not human and it is an animal. What if the hybrid was as intelligent and human seeming (aside from physical appearance) as anyone else? It still doesn't make them human, but it also doesn't make it ethically correct to kill and eat them.
What bringing into question the rights of chimps does is move the debate over rights and laws away from arbitrary and corollary traits and rather to the actual traits by which we judge what rights a being has. If a chimp is intelligent and reasoning and takes responsibility for itself and therefore has the right not to be killed, what does this imply for a brain dead human? Do they have the right not to be killed simply because of their species, or do they need to have specific traits?
You may think this is unimportant or nonsense, but you might think differently if you were a chimp. Adding into this equation the advancing pace of technology where hybrid, not quite humans may well come into being or where we may encounter extraterrestrials or where we may create self aware and intelligent machines, I think it behooves us to consider what is really important and worthy of protection. I sure don't think it is just our species any more than I think it is the subset of our species that is a given gender or race. I think it is the qualities exhibited by an individual, whatever species or type of being it is.
I think we should be cautious in exploring this, but I do think it is a very important topic for public debate if we're ever going to move from a society trained by rote memorization who mostly acts through imitation of others, to a society of reasoning and truly rational beings. Anyone who just accepts that humans should have rights and that nothing else should without considering the reasoning or the traits involved or who simply insists things should be the way they have been in the past, is a step backward for humanity.
Not to be a troll, but, is there a hard physiological reason not to eat people? Meat is meat.
Actually eating people is dangerous because of the possibility of disease transfer, and likewise eating closely related species can be unhealthy not just to the individual but to the species. We were not, however, talking about the ethics of eating human meat (which by itself seems ethical) but the ethics of killing and eating human beings, which is something else altogether.
How do you define what is the minimum requirement for intelligence ?
I don't. Intelligence is a sliding scale, not a boolean condition. The trick is deciding what level of intelligence should correspond to a given level of rights. As I said before, I think responsibility is the key. If an animal is willing to take responsibility for a given right, then it should have that right, up until that right conflicts with someone else's rights. For example, if a chimp is held to be intelligent and aware enough to take responsibility for itself such that it should not be killed at my discretion, it must likewise be held to the same standard itself, and arrested and punished by society if it kills another. I don't hold a shark responsible for killing a person, but at the same time I think people should have the right to kill and eat non-endangerd sharks at will. If a chimp claims responsibility for his own finances such that he claims to own property and money, then he is responsible for acts of theft and for paying taxes.
If some species appear from another galaxy and are more intelligent than us, and their baseline of intelligence is far above what we are capable of, they would be right in wiping us out ?
"Right" is a moral judgement and wholly subjective. Ethically, they are responsible if they do so. Maybe we carry a disease that will kill all other life on every other planet and are simply too great a danger to be allowed to exist. Maybe they simply think we are ugly and they value a different aesthetic. Every individual can make their own moral determination as to if wiping us out is "right" in the above circumstances, but according to my above ethical proposal for responsibility, because we take responsibility for ourselves, we have the right to decide for ourselves (having enough intelligence to decide if the universe would be better served by our own species extinction). If on the other hand, humanity traveled to another planet and everything there died as a result, we can and should be held responsible for that result, even if it is through our ignorance, because we took responsibility for our existence, making it unethical for said intelligent species to wipe us out. Understand?
...first chimps are given human rights, and then cows/bulls, chickens/roosters, pigs, etc.
You do know that the "slippery slope" is a classical logical fallacy right?
Before you know it the whole animal kingdom is given human rights and then meat is outlawed.
I assume you mean eating meat is outlawed? If meat is outlawed all animals are outlaws... or something. Anyway, I don't think you have to worry about your doomsday scenario. People like to eat meat and will vote appropriately. Big business likes to grow and sell meat and will lobby appropriately. If animals are given human rights, then they are also held responsible under the law. I seriously doubt the public will support a prison system full of all the predators that ate their prey, although a prison full of coyotes does sound entertaining.
I can't understand why someone would buy an Apple for anything other than a normal home desktop.
Well, one of my co-workers is moving to an Apple machine. I thought her logic was pretty flawless. She needs software that only runs on the mac, and since the mac can run Windows as well, it is the only machine capable of doing everything she needs.
I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do; especially for a small company.
For some reason I think you did not do a cost benefit analysis on the needs of the company where you were interviewing. As such, you're sort of talking out your ass aren't you? I mean you're assuming it is more expensive, but you don't have any facts to back that up. Apple is one of the approved vendors for laptops where I work. The other is Lenovo. The Apple machines are a bit cheaper, not more expensive. They are winning the reliability battle too, although it is a close thing. They seem like a very good choice for our medium sized software development house.
Sure, I will get modded down by Apple zealots.
A zealot is a person with strong, irrational beliefs. You haven't shown any reason or evidence in your assertion that the Mac is a bad choice, only expressed an opinion. Perhaps you deserve to be modded down, not because people irrationally love Apple, but because you've not presented any evidence for your dislike of Apple products.
Re:I don't understand why someone would buy Apple
on
Apple Ships 8-Core MacPro
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, Mac Pros are cheaper than the equivalent Dell machines. However, this is practically the only case where this is true.
This varies depending upon the release dates and whatnot, but in general, I disagree. Apple usually wins for small form factor, with the mini almost always cheaper than Dell and anyone else, and they frequently win for pro notebooks, though not always. In fact, Apple is usually a bit more expensive for the Mac Pro line and this is an anomaly. For matching the exact same hardware and ignoring installed software, the last market study I saw put Apple at 8% more expensive than Dell, but 4% cheaper than the market on average. Of course it also put Apple far and away ahead of Dell in customer support and hardware reliability which was not accounted for in the price difference.
The sites I've seen that compare average desktops and laptops always cheat by adding extra upgrades to Dell machines to make the prices match rather than just speccing them out exactly the same and seeing what they get.
In general, you have to add extras to Dell machines to get them to the same functionality as Apple machines. Dell mostly sells minimal machines, while Apple is committed to the midrange, with firewire, dual monitor support, etc. in everything. Realistically, Apple does not usually lose on price, they lose on lack of variety, making it harder to find exactly what you want and usually resulting in your purchasing more than you need, to get the features you do need. This is a subtly different problem.
Intelligence should not be a factor for this kind of rights, since someone with brain damage or an anomaly that would push his cognitive abilities under an animal could not claim these rights.
You're running afoul of a logical fallacy here. You're defining the answer, then looking for a way to get there. Logically, if intelligence is an important aspect, maybe that means people who have severe brain damage are no longer deserving of rights. This is just as likely as your assertion that intelligence must be the wrong criteria.
Personally, I see intelligence as one of several factors. Mostly I see rights and responsibilities as requisite to one another and think that needs to be key to any such discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! Do you truly not understand logic at all? Logic is a formal progression of thought. For example, if all trees are green, it must follow that the tree down the street from me is green. Since I can prove the tree down the street from me is not green, I have disproven the original assertion. That is logic. The assertion that if one thing happens in the future, something else will happen in the future is not true in and of itself. That is not to say that it cannot be true, but that particular relationship does not support that conclusion. For example, if we paint all trees in the world green, others will think it is a good idea and paint all rocks green. The former event in no way provides support for the latter event and anyone who claims it does is mistaken. I don't have to prove that no one will think it is a good idea or that people won't paint rocks green to show that this is a fallacy.
With that in mind, claiming that chickens will be granted rights if chimps are, is a clear logical fallacy. Maybe the former action does make the latter action more likely, but if it does that needs to be shown by a separate logical assertion. Simply the fact that the two things are similar in no way provides any evidence that such a thing will be the case.
Yet you seem to ignore the agenda of PETA, giving all animals the same rights as humans, and that is not a fallacy, and it proved my statement is not a fallacy either.You haven't shown that such an agenda is the goal of PETA. The point is, what you presented was a classical logical fallacy. Please educate yourself so that you do not continue to present such sloppy thinking. What do they teach in schools these days?
Umm, the same is true of the republicans, they just present it slightly differently. I don't think the fact that either party is incredibly deceptive is news to anyone.
I mean, it's no different than Republicans and the pro-life issue. They all pay lip service to ending abortion, yet haven't done anything about it. You can bet that if 1.3 million Americans were being killed each year by terrorism, the Republicans would be doing more than just confirming conservative judges and declaring their support for the cause.I'd like to think that would depend on if terrorists were only killing 1.3 million Americans who were already brain dead, but sadly it would simply be on based on how many votes an action would get them.
Kind of makes you wonder what they really stand for.Not really. They stand for amassing personal power and wealth and will support whatever they think will get them the most of it. Republicans don't make speeches about the evils of abortion or homosexuality because they find those things to be repugnant. Many of them are homosexuals or have taken part in deciding an abortion should take place for themselves or their wives or mistresses or girlfriends or daughters. They simply speak about what they think will get them the most votes.
I actually find this preferable to the rare few who are wacky religious zealots bent upon forcing all americans to obey their misguided religious ideals under threat of being thrown in prison and raped.
But moving on, I would go further and say that morality is objective, rather than subjective.
By definition, it is not. Individual morality or a moral consensus is always subjective. Ethics, are objective and rule based. That is the primary difference between the two, which are often misused terms in the English language. For example, according to the rules of ethics, you are responsible for actions you take and which you have not been coerced into performing. According to common morality in the US, stealing possessions from another is wrong. According to other cultures, stealing possessions from another without getting caught might be laudable and right. These are directly in conflict, but that is okay because morality is subjective.
The reason why I believe someone should be granted the full rights of a human being by simply being a member of the species (or instance of, if you will) is that no other standard completely guarantees human rights:
Even that does not guarantee such rights, nor are such rights necessarily sufficient. As a parallel, the US constitution and declaration of independence referred to "all men." Despite that blacks were still denied rights because it was said not to apply to them. It was further used as a reason to deny rights to women, despite the fact that they were just as deserving. That is why I feel using the term "human" is just as insufficient as the term "men."
It is essential that the definition of a human be unalterable...
I do not believe this is possible to accomplish. It has never worked in the past.
If we specify sentience as a criteria, the level at which one is considered human becomes completely arbitrary. Someone of insufficient intelligence or cognitive ability is loved no less by his parents because of this fact.
What does how much someone is loved have to do with it? The fact that an old woman dotes on her cat shows it may not be any less loved than if it were human. The fact that a automobile is no less loved than a bratty human child does not mean a car should be granted rights. A human with insufficient intelligence is probably not capable of taking responsibility for themselves and should not have the right to go anywhere they want or buy a firearm or sell their organs. That is why they are not now granted those rights, but are held in the custody of a guardian who manages those rights for them.
If we specify moral criteria, who defines what "moral ability" is? Again, it becomes completely arbitrary.
I said nothing about moral criteria, nor is intelligence a moral belief. I specified being intelligent and aware enough of a right to take responsibility for that right and accept the consequences thereof.
While racism may now seem repugnant, at the time of its heyday there were logical arguments in its favor. Proponents of racism claimed that other races lacked intelligence or moral uprightness, and hence, were less than fully human. If we want to avoid the error of the past, we would be wise to define humans strictly according to species.
Why? Is it true that only humans are capable of being intelligent or moral? Are all humans intelligent and moral? Being human does not make one worthy of having human rights. I can show you lumps of cells that are technically human, but that does not make them worthy of protection. If I were to use a new genetic technique to change your DNA such that you were technically no longer human, but there were no noticeable changes, does that make you any less deserving of rights? Should I then be free to kill you?
If you specify what criteria qualifies someone as human, you create a situation in which redefinition of that criteria can disenfranchise a whole class of people.
There is either a definition for human or not. Either way you can specify some group as part and some group as not by creating o
Where you're causing confusion is that not all things that impose a duty, are a right. In any case, the article was pretty clear on what type of rights are being discussed. Just look at "human rights watch" or another such organization and you'll find them enumerated.
A right to real property doesn't make sense in a nomadic culture.Most nomads still own possessions, but certainly the perception of relative rights is different in different cultures.
One culture might be concerned with the womans right not to have children, another more concerned with a womans right to have children as a protection for her old age.Here I think you're making a mistake. A right is an ability to make a personal decision and is paired with responsibility for that decision. The right to have children and the right to not have children are the same thing. If a woman chooses to have children as a way of getting support in her old age, she has responsibility for raising those children ad if she cannot society should deal with her for imposing a burden upon it. If she chooses not to have children and later in life she has no one to support and visit her, that too was her own choice and she is responsible for the consequences.
Black men and white men aren't really any different; men and women are different, but compared to an elephant or a dolphin they have quite a bit in common. All men (meaning humans) may be self evidently created equal, but it is not necessary to assume chimps are equal to humans to assume they have some rights.Black men and white men and men and women are different from one another. The thing is, those differences do not have anything to do with the criteria that indicates to our society that they are deserving of human rights. Some genes are different. That does not make them less intelligent or less reasoning or less feeling or less able to take responsibility for themselves. Some of them may not, however fit these criteria. They might be too young or mentally handicapped or completely lacking a brain. The point is whether you are human or not is not relevant to what makes one deserving of rights. An ant may not be deserving of rights. An average human might be. That does not make the difference in species the relevant criteria as demonstrated by my examples of humans that are not deserving. Likewise, a chimp might be deserving of some and the fact that they are a chimp, while it may correlate to some of those factors, is not a reason by itself. You have provided no logical or evidentiary argument to the contrary.
I don't see that in the original post. It reads, "...first chimps are given human rights, and then cows/bulls, chickens/roosters, pigs, etc. Before you know it the whole animal kingdom is given human rights and then meat is outlawed." I don't see where that speaks to the human psychology of it. Rather it seems an assertion that because chimps are given human rights, eventually meat will be outlawed. This does not follow and I don't see any evidence or even a logical chain of events to imply it would happen.
If someone specifically makes the claim that it logically has to be like that, then yes it would be a logical fallacy...Review your rules of logic. It is not only a fallacy if someone claims it must happen because of previous events, it is a fallacy to claim that the previous events provide support for the fact that it will happen. This is not so. Assuming chimps are given certain rights, that does not logically provide any evidence in and of itself to support the belief that, chickens will be given human rights.
...at least when I've heard someone use the "slippery slope" it has almost always been backed with claims of being based on empirical data, not logic.The slippery slope is defined by multiple future events. There can be data that supports both events or linking events, but the fallacy is in claiming one future event will lead to other, similar future events. That is not a logical assumption, despite that fact that many people seem to believe otherwise. Anyone who cites that as support for an argument automatically loses credibility to anyone who understand the rules of logic.
No. I have no idea what it is doing with the RAM. The point I was making was you can't just assume that the RAM being reported as in use is the minimum RAM needed by the system, since many OS's do pre-load some commonly used files and programs. In this day and age I'd be a little surprised if Vista was not doing at least some of that, but it is possible. As I said, that's not the point. I'm not saying Vista uses the memory well, I'm just saying the observation about reported RAM usage is not really a useful way to judge it. You need to actually load systems with a given amount of RAM and see how well Vista performs on them and how much RAM usage is reported on systems with different amounts of RAM but which are otherwise identical.
I don't want to count the number of times I saw Win2K users look at the CPU usage on a Linux system and complain that Linux was a resource hog because it was making full use of what it had, even though it would run fine with a whole lot less. Lets not encourage the same mistake with Vista.
Whether you call them "human rights" or "basic rights" or "intelligent, sentient being rights" is not as important as the concept. I think you're conflating basic rights and negotiated agreements. There is no basic right to be rewarded for work. If you do some work as a volunteer you have no right to be paid. If you make an agreement with someone that they pay you for some work, you still have no basic right to be paid, only an agreement that you will be. If you decide to go dig a ditch and no one pays you, your rights have not been violated.
A basic right is something like "freedom of expression" or the "right to live." That is not to say these rights are necessarily something we should recognize for every living being, only that they are potentially something a being has that should be recognized, assuming they take responsibility corresponding to that right. This has nothing to do with an agreement among actors that everyone has these rights, rather they are considered an intrinsic part of our existence.
If we are talking about different species, we are talking about relationships where the actors have very little in common, and the relationship is not mutually voluntary. We'd expect such a relationship to be asymmetrical.Why does the species have anything to do with it? You could just as easily say that if we're talking about a relationship between a black man and a white man or a man and a woman we'd expect the relationship to be asymmetrical. Or if a serial killer views you as simply prey and a lower order of being, he might consider your life to be worthless. None of that does anything to imply that you don't still have the basic right to live and express yourself so long as that right does not conflict with the rights of others.
Morally, perhaps, but legally no. You see the law is simply the common consensus as to the ethics of the disagreement, as mitigated by the defined rights of the constitution. The will of the people is far from perfect, but it is the best (safest) way to make decisions as a people that we've come up with yet.
So who decides when a human being is considered not a human, from the perspective of the law? The judge? Yes, directly, but he only interprets the law, which is effected by the majority of the voting public.Actually, this would be a jury of peers, most likely; interpreting the law which theoretically embodies the will of the majority.
The problem is that the law changes. In the 1800's, a Black person didn't count as fully human, simply because of the color of their skin. In the 1930's, Jews were not considered fully human simply because of their ancestry. And this happened in democratic republics. The legal definition of what constituted a human being was capricious, subject to the purely arbitrary whims of the public. If you allow the public to decide who is and isn't human, and consequently, deserving of the protection of law, inevitably the criteria will be changed to benefit those in power.I disagree. It isn't a problem that the law changes, but a benefit. If the law did not change black people and jews would still not be considered humans by the legal system. Your assertion that the definition will always change to benefit those in power is not well supported by history. Thus far most of the changes to what defines a person have been to the detriment of incumbent powers.
Our society uses terminology to minimize the rights of others. We should not be naive in thinking that if we do not hold to the most basic definition of what a human being is - that is, a member of the human species - that others will modify the definition to disenfranchise those which they despise. Our history is filled with examples of doing just that.If you try to freeze the law as inflexible in the hopes of preventing things from getting worse, you also stop them from getting better. It does not work. If Union Carbide develops a way to breed beings that are 90% human DNA and have the same brains and feelings, but look a little different should we forever deny these beings human rights and let them be used as slaves out of fear that the definition of "human' could also be changed for the worst? What about artificially intelligent computers? What about extra terrestrials? What about intelligent terrestrial beings like dolphins, who are arguably as intelligent and deserving of life as humans are?
We need to guarantee rights based upon the real criteria upon which they should be based, that is to say the traits that are worthy of those rights, rather than trying to hold to outdated and inaccurate correlative traits out of a fear of change. Whether rights are granted to the human species of to any being with appropriate intelligence and responsibility, powerful people will find ways to take those rights away from subsets of those who should have it. We haven't changed the definition of human, but already large numbers of people you cite yourself are denied those rights. What makes you think preventing deserving beings from having those rights as well will in any way stop that from happening? I think you're way off here.
Actually, I don't think this is true at all. The democrats have favored many policies that imposed personal morality upon the public, from gun control legislation, to anti-pollution laws.
A theme which goes all the way back to President Lincoln (a Republican) who forced his views of morality on the issue of slavery on the entire country with disastrous results. Now, thanks to the Republicans, you can't own slaves anymore.You slept through your high school history classes, huh? Lincoln was opposed to slavery, but also was against outlawing it as he feared it would create too large of a split between the north and south. It was only the misguided fear that he would outlaw slavery that led to the civil war and then to the emancipation.
Okay you boot up some generic desktop OS and the OS has loaded and is functional. Would you rather it:
Yeah, that's just crazy. We all know the souls is coded in one particular gene sequence, present in humans, except lawyers and politicians. Some day we hope to isolate it to cure or at least stop the breeding of these soulless humanoid monsters.
As an OS for the masses, users shouldn't even need to know what RAM is or how much is being used at a given time. Maybe if performance is really slow it should recommend running fewer programs at a time or buying more RAM. In any case, your implication that Microsoft could put out a less than perfect user interface astounds me. We all know how good they are at user interfaces :)
Ethically, they do actually. A person with no rights, ethically has no corresponding responsibilities. Heck even "Spiderman" gets this relationship, "with extraordinary power comes extraordinary responsibility."
Okay, on NewEgg medium quality (crucial) RAM for the new Power Mac runs about $80 cheaper for 2 Gb. So if you don't like it, buy your extra RAM on NewEgg. What's the problem? Or were you assuming everyone uses crappy low quality RAM which is probably the number one source of computer crashes, but most people don't ever figure that out.
You imply that you can put in a new(er) Nvidia card in a Mac Pro and it will work. It won't! You cannot put in a 8k series Nvidia card in a Mac Pro and get it to work in OSX.Umm, most video cards work just fine. I always check before buying one, but I've never, ever had a problem. Some of the cards that are coming out now do not support EFI, and fail back to BIOS compatibility, which may work with Windows, but not OS X (who never used BIOS). In general, however, any video card you buy will work fine.
You have 3 different video cards that will work and be supported on this Macintosh.Just because Apple only ships 3 from their store does not mean other ones do not work.
... just give me a $4000 machine with a video card that isn't two freaking years old, and no real method of upgrading.You pull it out and stick another one in. It's not that hard. Macmall.com lists 136 different PCI Express graphics cards compatible with the new Power Mac. If you want to blow $6K on a graphics card, go right ahead. About the only cards that don't work are the Nvidia 5500 series because of some driver problem they haven't worked out yet.
This is not a good judge of how much RAM Vista needs. A well designed OS should use as much RAM as possible all the time, even if that RAM is just loading programs the OS thinks you might want to use soon in an effort to speed up their load times. Idle RAM is wasted RAM.
That said, the minimum amount of RAM needed in Vista to have a useful system seems much higher from my own, very brief testing.
All drivers for Vista are lousy. They have serious memory leak issues, and when they start to have problems Vista disables them.I'll answer this the same way as when talking to Linux advocates. We don't care why so much as what the end result is. Right now Vista sucks because of crappy drivers. In a year or two I expect that to settle down, but for now it would be irresponsible to recommend Vista for some purpose without taking this into account and either selecting hardware to avoid the problem or being prepared to deal with slow performance and crashes. This is probably the number one reason why no consultant in their right mind is willing to recommend a business switch to Vista for the first year or two.
Obviously there is a sliding scale of rights and development. A human that never develops more than a rudimentary brain should expect the same rights as an animal with equivalent intelligence and responsibility. Most scientists place adult chimps at about the same cognitive level as a 5 year old human. Until the average human reaches 5 years of age, they should then have similar rights and responsibilities as a chimp, whatever that is determined to be. As for a fetus in an intermediate stage, it depends upon where in the stage that is. For example, humans are legally allowed to put a dog to sleep if they decide it would be inconvenient for their lifestyle. Assuming we don't have a double standard, why should a fetus with an equivalent level of intellect and understanding be treated any differently (note, from what I've read I doubt any unborn baby would reach this level of development).
Now there is room for argument that both dogs and fetuses should be given more protection than they currently have, and that is a valid judgement call, but I've never even once heard any "pro-life" advocate make that argument. All the arguments I have heard deal not with objective opinions about the level of rights a given being should have, but about religious opinions about souls and the inherent superiority of humans.
Personally, as someone who accepts death as an inevitable consequence of life and who values quality of life, I think the current abortion laws in the US make sense and are more than conservative enough to make sure any human with intelligence and awareness approaching that of a chicken are protected unless it is a case of balancing that fetus's rights against that of the mother, who is a fully functioning adult with a defined sense of being. Anything currently legal to abort in the US, is pretty brainless at that point and I see no reason to provide them with extraordinary protections based upon that level of consciousness.
...in hopes that they would finally offer a more "standard" RAM and hopefully a 8k Nvidia card. (This mac uses weird slow RAM that is very expensiveEvery machine running this generation of Xeon processors needs the type of RAM Apple uses and calling it "slow" does not really help your credibility here.
I thought it "might" be possible to upgrade the video card myself, but found out you can't do that.Umm, you can't? Since when? You've been able to swap the video cards in Apple's towers for about 8-10 years now.
It makes little to no sense to me that Apple chose to not use the same freaking graphics cards as a standard PC.Apple uses standard video cards, but as usual are a little ahead of the curve. Not all cards support EFI yet, since Vista is the first version of Windows to support it on the desktop properly. You're probably one of those people who complained about Apple's nonstandard choice of using USB for keyboards and mice instead of PS/2. Now many years later the bottom end of the PC market is finally catching up but my 8 year old mac is still working fine because they included USB and firewire instead of what was "standard" at the time.
Apple, you almost had a Windows/Linux user switched, but your RAM and Video card selection lost you one.Personally, I'm glad Apple is forward looking and pushes current standards instead of decade old ones. If they lose a few sales from people who can't wait 6 moths for the Windows crowd to play catch up and for more widespread support from third party vendors, I think it is a small loss.
That is not a reason why a given being should have rights and another should not, just a prescribed behavior. Who is to say what is necessary? Is testing pain relievers on animals necessary? How many monkey lives are worth a human life? I see it as a matter of us taking responsibility for what we do, and thus claiming the right and the responsibility for the results.
I don't see how your idea would allow us to determine if a chimp or a artificially intelligent computer or an alien race or a human-animal hybrid created in a lab should have a given right currently granted only to humans by our laws.
I think you can hold a chimp responsible for any crime that corresponds to the right/responsibility it has. For example, if chimps have a right to not be killed, then chimps should be held responsible by society when they kill a person or another chimp. If they are not held responsible for this, then they conversely should not be granted that right. Note, rights do not have to be an all or nothing proposal. A chimp might be accorded such a right to life and the accompanying responsibility, but not the right to own property and the accompanying responsibility to pay taxes on it.
Trying to extend what is now human rights to not only apes but all animals (I can see efforts in that direction) leads automatically to paradoxes: animals kill each other all the time, that's the way life is. Believing in so called "animal right to life" implies (in case the person believing in it is consistent and smart, which is seldom the case) automatically that all the predators and omnivores are criminals.I think this is the slippery slope logical fallacy. Just because chimps are intelligent and reasoning enough to be granted some right, does not imply that fish or rabbits are. Animals, including humans, kill other animals for food and that is part of our nature. As humans we take responsibility for that killing. For example, we have endangered species laws to prevent the extinction of species because of our actions and we have animal cruelty laws to insure that animals do not suffer unnecessarily in the process. We have judged that our right to kill is more important than some other animal's right to live. That does not mean this holds true for all animals.
Imagine, for example, a geneticist managed to cross a human with a cow. Our laws make it legal to kill and eat a cow or other non-human animal. They make it illegal to kill and eat a human in most cases. Ethically is it okay to kill and eat the hybrid? Legally is it okay to kill and eat the hybrid? Technically it is not human and it is an animal. What if the hybrid was as intelligent and human seeming (aside from physical appearance) as anyone else? It still doesn't make them human, but it also doesn't make it ethically correct to kill and eat them.
What bringing into question the rights of chimps does is move the debate over rights and laws away from arbitrary and corollary traits and rather to the actual traits by which we judge what rights a being has. If a chimp is intelligent and reasoning and takes responsibility for itself and therefore has the right not to be killed, what does this imply for a brain dead human? Do they have the right not to be killed simply because of their species, or do they need to have specific traits?
You may think this is unimportant or nonsense, but you might think differently if you were a chimp. Adding into this equation the advancing pace of technology where hybrid, not quite humans may well come into being or where we may encounter extraterrestrials or where we may create self aware and intelligent machines, I think it behooves us to consider what is really important and worthy of protection. I sure don't think it is just our species any more than I think it is the subset of our species that is a given gender or race. I think it is the qualities exhibited by an individual, whatever species or type of being it is.
I think we should be cautious in exploring this, but I do think it is a very important topic for public debate if we're ever going to move from a society trained by rote memorization who mostly acts through imitation of others, to a society of reasoning and truly rational beings. Anyone who just accepts that humans should have rights and that nothing else should without considering the reasoning or the traits involved or who simply insists things should be the way they have been in the past, is a step backward for humanity.
Actually eating people is dangerous because of the possibility of disease transfer, and likewise eating closely related species can be unhealthy not just to the individual but to the species. We were not, however, talking about the ethics of eating human meat (which by itself seems ethical) but the ethics of killing and eating human beings, which is something else altogether.
I don't. Intelligence is a sliding scale, not a boolean condition. The trick is deciding what level of intelligence should correspond to a given level of rights. As I said before, I think responsibility is the key. If an animal is willing to take responsibility for a given right, then it should have that right, up until that right conflicts with someone else's rights. For example, if a chimp is held to be intelligent and aware enough to take responsibility for itself such that it should not be killed at my discretion, it must likewise be held to the same standard itself, and arrested and punished by society if it kills another. I don't hold a shark responsible for killing a person, but at the same time I think people should have the right to kill and eat non-endangerd sharks at will. If a chimp claims responsibility for his own finances such that he claims to own property and money, then he is responsible for acts of theft and for paying taxes.
If some species appear from another galaxy and are more intelligent than us, and their baseline of intelligence is far above what we are capable of, they would be right in wiping us out ?"Right" is a moral judgement and wholly subjective. Ethically, they are responsible if they do so. Maybe we carry a disease that will kill all other life on every other planet and are simply too great a danger to be allowed to exist. Maybe they simply think we are ugly and they value a different aesthetic. Every individual can make their own moral determination as to if wiping us out is "right" in the above circumstances, but according to my above ethical proposal for responsibility, because we take responsibility for ourselves, we have the right to decide for ourselves (having enough intelligence to decide if the universe would be better served by our own species extinction). If on the other hand, humanity traveled to another planet and everything there died as a result, we can and should be held responsible for that result, even if it is through our ignorance, because we took responsibility for our existence, making it unethical for said intelligent species to wipe us out. Understand?
...first chimps are given human rights, and then cows/bulls, chickens/roosters, pigs, etc.You do know that the "slippery slope" is a classical logical fallacy right?
Before you know it the whole animal kingdom is given human rights and then meat is outlawed.I assume you mean eating meat is outlawed? If meat is outlawed all animals are outlaws... or something. Anyway, I don't think you have to worry about your doomsday scenario. People like to eat meat and will vote appropriately. Big business likes to grow and sell meat and will lobby appropriately. If animals are given human rights, then they are also held responsible under the law. I seriously doubt the public will support a prison system full of all the predators that ate their prey, although a prison full of coyotes does sound entertaining.
Well, one of my co-workers is moving to an Apple machine. I thought her logic was pretty flawless. She needs software that only runs on the mac, and since the mac can run Windows as well, it is the only machine capable of doing everything she needs.
I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do; especially for a small company.For some reason I think you did not do a cost benefit analysis on the needs of the company where you were interviewing. As such, you're sort of talking out your ass aren't you? I mean you're assuming it is more expensive, but you don't have any facts to back that up. Apple is one of the approved vendors for laptops where I work. The other is Lenovo. The Apple machines are a bit cheaper, not more expensive. They are winning the reliability battle too, although it is a close thing. They seem like a very good choice for our medium sized software development house.
Sure, I will get modded down by Apple zealots.A zealot is a person with strong, irrational beliefs. You haven't shown any reason or evidence in your assertion that the Mac is a bad choice, only expressed an opinion. Perhaps you deserve to be modded down, not because people irrationally love Apple, but because you've not presented any evidence for your dislike of Apple products.
This varies depending upon the release dates and whatnot, but in general, I disagree. Apple usually wins for small form factor, with the mini almost always cheaper than Dell and anyone else, and they frequently win for pro notebooks, though not always. In fact, Apple is usually a bit more expensive for the Mac Pro line and this is an anomaly. For matching the exact same hardware and ignoring installed software, the last market study I saw put Apple at 8% more expensive than Dell, but 4% cheaper than the market on average. Of course it also put Apple far and away ahead of Dell in customer support and hardware reliability which was not accounted for in the price difference.
The sites I've seen that compare average desktops and laptops always cheat by adding extra upgrades to Dell machines to make the prices match rather than just speccing them out exactly the same and seeing what they get.In general, you have to add extras to Dell machines to get them to the same functionality as Apple machines. Dell mostly sells minimal machines, while Apple is committed to the midrange, with firewire, dual monitor support, etc. in everything. Realistically, Apple does not usually lose on price, they lose on lack of variety, making it harder to find exactly what you want and usually resulting in your purchasing more than you need, to get the features you do need. This is a subtly different problem.
You're running afoul of a logical fallacy here. You're defining the answer, then looking for a way to get there. Logically, if intelligence is an important aspect, maybe that means people who have severe brain damage are no longer deserving of rights. This is just as likely as your assertion that intelligence must be the wrong criteria.
Personally, I see intelligence as one of several factors. Mostly I see rights and responsibilities as requisite to one another and think that needs to be key to any such discussion.