What the media isn't reporting about the tragedy in Parkland

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_honorentheos
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Re: What the media isn't reporting about the tragedy in Park

Post by _honorentheos »

DoubtingThomas wrote:
EAllusion wrote:We figured out how to cooperate well enough to traverse the planet, but that hasn't made life easier on the many species we wiped out in the process. It's not a given that a cooperative species would have regard for us.


You are right, we can't really know what alien visitors would do. However, I think alien visitors would more likely be "good". If we humans discover life on Mars the scientists are unlikely to kill it just for fun.

DT,

It's very difficult to engage with you on the subject of morality because it isn't clear how you actually think about it as a subject. For example, while being fond of using the phrase objective morality dismissively while putting good and evil in scare quotes, you do not actually behave in a way that suggests this is anything more than reckless disregard for moral tradition. For all other intents and purposes, you seem to very much believe in universally applicable moral laws or behaviors. Or project human interests including human thriving in an anthropomorphic way that may as well be an assumption of objective morality. Your issue seems to be with religion and religious declarations of what is or is not moral, but that's about as much as I can really gather from your online behavior.

Take this discussion about alien life as an example. Even though you use scare quotes around evil, your usage doesn't make the concept of evil irrelevant to what you are trying to say. You've gone at least one meaningful step past the typical arguments used to define morality as a human construct by attributing moral behaviors and intentions to non-human, non terrestrial life forms. Your reply to EA above justifies an argument by once again comparing advanced alien life to humans and essentially projects a common basis for morality onto them as you argue that they should be expected to behave the same way a so-called good human should be expected to behave if they were to encounter a new species from another planet.

That seems dangerous when one is dealing with something so essential to one's well being as their moral background and decision making processes. There's an illusion of being in control of one's thinking when from the outside it's ungrounded and reckless.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
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