yeah - the reason i picked the scenario where the animal has to be tormented rather than painlessly killed for food was to anticipate people who complain that animals are tortured (not just killed) in medical research facilities, which i dont doubt they often are (not tortured "for fun" but as part of the necessary process). the trouble is when push comes to shove, would you die rather than allow an animal to be tortured?
some zealous animal rights activists might say yes, but personally i think that if they were in the actual situation they might very well have second thoughts.
can you explain what is wrong with moral relativism?
also, could you explicitly enumerate the steps in following that logic through to the conclusion that it is ok to eat your own mother?
As far as i understand it, moral relativism is just the acceptance of the reality that human morality is a product of subjective sensibilities which are themselves a product of biology.
All the decrials i've heard against moral relativism are religious in basis, and consist entirely of the assertion that without an arbitrary absolute moral baseline, grounded purely in primitive religious dogma, it is impossible for morality to exist in any meaningful form. This then usually leads on to a lot of histrionics about moral relativism means that it is ok to kill people if you personally feel it is ok.
They never seem to notice the hypocrisy that deciding its ok to kill people for no real reason is a big part religious moral absolutism too.
the point of moral relativism isnt to say it is moral to do whatever you feel like, the point is to understand the reality of the origin and function of morality so that we can move on from arbitrarily making up rules that dont apply to everyone. It is so bitterly ironic that the very thing moral absolutists decry relativism for is everything such absolutism is guilty of - unjustifiable and arbitrary morals.
it always bemuses me that whenever there is a new invention/scientific project reported on slashdot, a gaggle of slashbots assume that their casual understanding of physics/engineering means they are qualified to rubbish the entire idea as if the qualified scientists and engineers that proposed it are just pulling stuff out of their asses.
i think its not so black and white. if you were about to die of cancer and some scientists said they could synthesise a cure by torturing a cage full of rabbits would you want them to? Even though its a horrible choice i cant see that i would choose to die.
on the other hand, testing something so trivial as make up on an animal doesnt have any ethical justification that i can discern. then there's the sliding scale in between.
it's an interesting problem - i think of money like mass. The more of it there is one place, the more money it attracts, until you get to a point where its like a black hole and there is no way to stop it sucking up whoever's money it wants.
It's quite a fascinating idea, it strikes me as the kind of system that Vulcans would have;) It's worth making sure you read the misconceptions page too as it take a little while for what they mean to sink in.
wouldnt unregulated capitalism just degenerate into a handful of monopolists/cartels with so much money they can buy up an army and start their own gangster state?
its obvious to everyone except an utter pedant that i meant almost no mainstream games are available on linux.
linux probably has the same level of games support that mac os x does, i.e. if you went in gamestation looking to buy some games you may very well find one or two or none at all that run on linux or mac os x.
your anecdotal success at having sufficient games support on linux is one tiny drop in what is obviously going to be an ocean of insufficiency should a meaningfully large sample of linux users be surveyed about the games they want to play.
i'm an ardent linux supporter, but please; the planet i live on is called earth. it doesnt sound like you live there at all.
you can browse the internet, read your email and use messenger. you can use write letters and spreadsheets. casual users dont care about specific apps.
of course, you cant play games, so you've lost the more mainstream early adopter/experimenter types, which i think is a massive Achilles heel.
Imagine if mac os x was free and ran on any hardware. that's the kind of baseline penetration you should expect from linux once the polish is a bit shinier.
it depends on how many people an average want 4 controllers. as for that i can only give anecdotal evidence, which as we all know is worthless, so i wont even bother;)
the retailers being comfortable implies that they're confident they can sell them. trust me, i'm a retailer (not of consoles), and being comfortable with the price of a product means you think people will happily pay for it.
admiral ackbar, lol. now i'll picture him every time i see that stupid tag. hopefully soon everyone will start putting "yes no maybe fud notfud" on every single article so that this broken tagging system that everyone uses to state their opinion will have to be retired.
Its sounds a lot like WINE. Why the hell would Microsoft want to reimplement WINE? Or maybe he's suggesting MS want to appropriate the Linux Kernel for future versions of windows. Either way i think none of this has anything to do with the recent "pact".
Cue the landslide of contradictory anecdotes, all proving nothing whatsoever. You cant draw a generalised conclusion simply from your own personal experience. How do you know that 90% of the people who have ever installed windows or ubuntu didnt have exactly the opposite experience? The same applies either way round. Without a statistically significant sample size (i.e. much greater than 1 in this case) you cant draw any conclusions.
"btw, the point at which a bunch of cells becomes a human being is the point at which it's capable of surviving outwith the mother's body. Until that point it's not a viable human being."
i think the ethical part of not aborting foetuses kind of hinges on whether or not their conciousness has started yet. if the foetus isnt capable of perceiving itself then by killing it you arent taking anything away from it, or causing it any trauma.
All this leaves is the fact that it may have carried on to lead a life, but if you start down that line of reasoning you end up banning contraceptives and masturbation.
There are existing stem cell lines, created from embryos, that have funds available for research. There is no good reason to fund the creation of more embryonic stem cell lines.
could you be more specific. i dont understand what you mean.
That's like me saying that under your argument, there should be no limit to research as long as it has potential.
No what you were saying is we should not engage in embryonic stem cell research because it might not yield any results (possible but very unlikely) and some people are upset by it. I was criticising this standpoint. I never said research is essential at all costs. I even preempted this line of reasoning by mentioning i was opposed to involutary experiments on people.
I try to resist that kind of attack. While we both agree that we should not experiment on prisoners, we disagree on where the line should be drawn. But, the line has to be drawn somewhere. I can't say when human life begins, no one can for sure. And if you are not sure, where do you draw the line?
I agree, you cant be sure when it HAS started, so you draw the line in a place where you are sure it HASNT started. Like when it doenst have a brain or nervous system.
I have a one month old baby girl. After observing here for some time, I would say that she is not quite capable of thought. Is it OK to experiment on her?
Your opinion that she is not capable of concious thought is entirely subjective. if an organism only consisted of 36 cells, you couldnt really argue that it might be able to think. Its lack of thinking ability would be an objective scientific fact. You are comparing apples and oranges. Of course no one could advocate that its ok to experiment on a child because "they might not be capable of thought" becuase thats a very shaky assumption. The fact that 36 stem cells dont contain a brain thoroughly smashes the notion that they could be aware of what is happening to them.
Your toenail clippings can not grow into a human.
If you follow that line of reasoning to its conclusion then you have a moral obligation to spend all your national resources finding a way to collect every unused sperm and egg generated by every man and woman in your country and fertilise them, otherwise you are denying vital medical assistance to billions of potential americans.
So, when does a human mind develop to the point where we consider the human a legal or ethical person? I have no idea.
No one does, but just becuase we cant pinpoint the moment it changes doesnt mean we cant objectively know when it is in one of the states before that change. I.e, not having a brain for instance.
Who says we can achieve it through embryonic stem cell research? Who says we CAN'T find by using chord blood stem cells.
That's why you do research. Cant you understand how twisted your reasoning is? You might as well use that arguement to stop spending money on any research of anything.
No one says we can definitely achieve anything through either course. thats the purpose of experimentation and research. My god, we'd all be living in caves if everyone took that line of reasoning.
Can you tell me the difference between chord blood stem cells and stem cells harvested from embryos? Why harvest embryos when we are throwing away perfectly viable stem cells after every child birth? WHY MUST YOU PERFORM RESEARCH THAT IS CONTROVERSIAL WHEN THE SAME GOALS CAN BE ACHIEVED THROUGH NON-CONTROVERSIAL MEANS???!!??!
But i just explained all of that to you. Restating your refuted point in capital letters won't change reality. Here it is again (in bold to distinguish it from quotes from you, not to artificially reinforce my point, which stands on its own merits):
My understanding is that non-embryonic stem cells are already partially differentiated, which means they have less potential abilities. There is nothing wrong with experimentation on them as far as I am concerned, and despite your implication resources are put there. But that is irrelevant, since there are properties of embryonic stem cells that are not present in the non-embryonic cells, and this is the whole crux of wanting to conduct research specifically on embryonic cells.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah - the reason i picked the scenario where the animal has to be tormented rather than painlessly killed for food was to anticipate people who complain that animals are tortured (not just killed) in medical research facilities, which i dont doubt they often are (not tortured "for fun" but as part of the necessary process). the trouble is when push comes to shove, would you die rather than allow an animal to be tortured?
some zealous animal rights activists might say yes, but personally i think that if they were in the actual situation they might very well have second thoughts.
can you explain what is wrong with moral relativism?
also, could you explicitly enumerate the steps in following that logic through to the conclusion that it is ok to eat your own mother?
As far as i understand it, moral relativism is just the acceptance of the reality that human morality is a product of subjective sensibilities which are themselves a product of biology.
All the decrials i've heard against moral relativism are religious in basis, and consist entirely of the assertion that without an arbitrary absolute moral baseline, grounded purely in primitive religious dogma, it is impossible for morality to exist in any meaningful form. This then usually leads on to a lot of histrionics about moral relativism means that it is ok to kill people if you personally feel it is ok.
They never seem to notice the hypocrisy that deciding its ok to kill people for no real reason is a big part religious moral absolutism too.
the point of moral relativism isnt to say it is moral to do whatever you feel like, the point is to understand the reality of the origin and function of morality so that we can move on from arbitrarily making up rules that dont apply to everyone. It is so bitterly ironic that the very thing moral absolutists decry relativism for is everything such absolutism is guilty of - unjustifiable and arbitrary morals.
thank god i'm not the only one who hates this :)
it always bemuses me that whenever there is a new invention/scientific project reported on slashdot, a gaggle of slashbots assume that their casual understanding of physics/engineering means they are qualified to rubbish the entire idea as if the qualified scientists and engineers that proposed it are just pulling stuff out of their asses.
stupid, ignorant, arrogance.
i think its not so black and white. if you were about to die of cancer and some scientists said they could synthesise a cure by torturing a cage full of rabbits would you want them to? Even though its a horrible choice i cant see that i would choose to die.
on the other hand, testing something so trivial as make up on an animal doesnt have any ethical justification that i can discern. then there's the sliding scale in between.
it's an interesting problem - i think of money like mass. The more of it there is one place, the more money it attracts, until you get to a point where its like a black hole and there is no way to stop it sucking up whoever's money it wants.
;) It's worth making sure you read the misconceptions page too as it take a little while for what they mean to sink in.
There is an interesting "economic" theory called technocracy that i dont seem to find anyone talking about any where. http://www.technocracy.ca/simp/begin.htm
It's quite a fascinating idea, it strikes me as the kind of system that Vulcans would have
wouldnt unregulated capitalism just degenerate into a handful of monopolists/cartels with so much money they can buy up an army and start their own gangster state?
its obvious to everyone except an utter pedant that i meant almost no mainstream games are available on linux.
linux probably has the same level of games support that mac os x does, i.e. if you went in gamestation looking to buy some games you may very well find one or two or none at all that run on linux or mac os x.
your anecdotal success at having sufficient games support on linux is one tiny drop in what is obviously going to be an ocean of insufficiency should a meaningfully large sample of linux users be surveyed about the games they want to play.
i'm an ardent linux supporter, but please; the planet i live on is called earth. it doesnt sound like you live there at all.
you can browse the internet, read your email and use messenger. you can use write letters and spreadsheets. casual users dont care about specific apps.
of course, you cant play games, so you've lost the more mainstream early adopter/experimenter types, which i think is a massive Achilles heel.
Imagine if mac os x was free and ran on any hardware. that's the kind of baseline penetration you should expect from linux once the polish is a bit shinier.
it depends on how many people an average want 4 controllers. as for that i can only give anecdotal evidence, which as we all know is worthless, so i wont even bother ;)
probably because slashdot isn't a useful indicator of public opinion.
the retailers being comfortable implies that they're confident they can sell them. trust me, i'm a retailer (not of consoles), and being comfortable with the price of a product means you think people will happily pay for it.
admiral ackbar, lol. now i'll picture him every time i see that stupid tag. hopefully soon everyone will start putting "yes no maybe fud notfud" on every single article so that this broken tagging system that everyone uses to state their opinion will have to be retired.
Its sounds a lot like WINE. Why the hell would Microsoft want to reimplement WINE? Or maybe he's suggesting MS want to appropriate the Linux Kernel for future versions of windows. Either way i think none of this has anything to do with the recent "pact".
if the lens covered a larger area than the pump it could gather light in that would not have hit the pump.
of course - it all makes sense now! :p
you are talking about installation issues. If you gave a newbie a laptop with ubuntu set up on it, it would be no more difficult to use than windows.
I would say that ubuntu is less likely to go wrong than windows though, in the same way that MacOS X is.
Cue the landslide of contradictory anecdotes, all proving nothing whatsoever. You cant draw a generalised conclusion simply from your own personal experience. How do you know that 90% of the people who have ever installed windows or ubuntu didnt have exactly the opposite experience? The same applies either way round. Without a statistically significant sample size (i.e. much greater than 1 in this case) you cant draw any conclusions.
the same time as "fud notfud yes no maybe" stops being tagged to EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ARTICLE
"btw, the point at which a bunch of cells becomes a human being is the point at which it's capable of surviving outwith the mother's body. Until that point it's not a viable human being."
i think the ethical part of not aborting foetuses kind of hinges on whether or not their conciousness has started yet. if the foetus isnt capable of perceiving itself then by killing it you arent taking anything away from it, or causing it any trauma.
All this leaves is the fact that it may have carried on to lead a life, but if you start down that line of reasoning you end up banning contraceptives and masturbation.
oh i see, sorry i misunderstood your standpoint. that's all fair enough.
There are existing stem cell lines, created from embryos, that have funds available for research. There is no good reason to fund the creation of more embryonic stem cell lines.
could you be more specific. i dont understand what you mean.
That's like me saying that under your argument, there should be no limit to research as long as it has potential.
No what you were saying is we should not engage in embryonic stem cell research because it might not yield any results (possible but very unlikely) and some people are upset by it. I was criticising this standpoint. I never said research is essential at all costs. I even preempted this line of reasoning by mentioning i was opposed to involutary experiments on people.
I try to resist that kind of attack. While we both agree that we should not experiment on prisoners, we disagree on where the line should be drawn. But, the line has to be drawn somewhere. I can't say when human life begins, no one can for sure. And if you are not sure, where do you draw the line?
I agree, you cant be sure when it HAS started, so you draw the line in a place where you are sure it HASNT started. Like when it doenst have a brain or nervous system.
I have a one month old baby girl. After observing here for some time, I would say that she is not quite capable of thought. Is it OK to experiment on her?
Your opinion that she is not capable of concious thought is entirely subjective. if an organism only consisted of 36 cells, you couldnt really argue that it might be able to think. Its lack of thinking ability would be an objective scientific fact. You are comparing apples and oranges. Of course no one could advocate that its ok to experiment on a child because "they might not be capable of thought" becuase thats a very shaky assumption. The fact that 36 stem cells dont contain a brain thoroughly smashes the notion that they could be aware of what is happening to them.
Your toenail clippings can not grow into a human.
If you follow that line of reasoning to its conclusion then you have a moral obligation to spend all your national resources finding a way to collect every unused sperm and egg generated by every man and woman in your country and fertilise them, otherwise you are denying vital medical assistance to billions of potential americans.
So, when does a human mind develop to the point where we consider the human a legal or ethical person? I have no idea.
No one does, but just becuase we cant pinpoint the moment it changes doesnt mean we cant objectively know when it is in one of the states before that change. I.e, not having a brain for instance.
Who says we can achieve it through embryonic stem cell research? Who says we CAN'T find by using chord blood stem cells.
That's why you do research. Cant you understand how twisted your reasoning is? You might as well use that arguement to stop spending money on any research of anything.
No one says we can definitely achieve anything through either course. thats the purpose of experimentation and research. My god, we'd all be living in caves if everyone took that line of reasoning.
Can you tell me the difference between chord blood stem cells and stem cells harvested from embryos? Why harvest embryos when we are throwing away perfectly viable stem cells after every child birth? WHY MUST YOU PERFORM RESEARCH THAT IS CONTROVERSIAL WHEN THE SAME GOALS CAN BE ACHIEVED THROUGH NON-CONTROVERSIAL MEANS???!!??!
But i just explained all of that to you. Restating your refuted point in capital letters won't change reality. Here it is again (in bold to distinguish it from quotes from you, not to artificially reinforce my point, which stands on its own merits): My understanding is that non-embryonic stem cells are already partially differentiated, which means they have less potential abilities. There is nothing wrong with experimentation on them as far as I am concerned, and despite your implication resources are put there. But that is irrelevant, since there are properties of embryonic stem cells that are not present in the non-embryonic cells, and this is the whole crux of wanting to conduct research specifically on embryonic cells.
It's britain that's granting licenses for human/animal hybrids. They dont produce viable embryos.