If you could be a God...

If you could be a God... Apr 4, 2018 1:13:52 GMT

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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Apr 4, 2018 1:13:52 GMT

Apr 3, 2018 14:26:36 GMT @miccee said:

Apr 3, 2018 1:30:25 GMT Eva Yojimbo said:

I snipped your post here because I think the rest gets too far into the specifics of this topic and too far away from the generalizations I’m talking about.

First, no, you can’t defend fundamental values rationally because those fundamental values are what you reason from. It’s the same principle as in logic; you must have propositions that are assumed without being proven in order to do logic at all. Now, many propositions are indeed conclusions derived from other logical arguments, but if you keep going back you’ll eventually find the fundamental propositions that are assumed/not proven that everything else rests on.

Second, you don’t need religion to value life itself. Most people, including atheists, value life to some extent. The value doesn’t have to be intrinsic or objective either.

Third, most value consent as well, but there’s no reason one can’t value life more than consent, or even say that in a situation where consent isn’t possible we can’t value the desires of the parents more. There's not even a problem, rationally speaking, with not conferring our "consent" values onto those not living, or on non-humans. We make exceptions for all kinds of values we have.

Finally, I’m not saying we SHOULD value life or parents’ desires more, or that we SHOULDN'T confer our consent values onto the unborn; merely that it’s not innately irrational to do/not do so.

If you think that you can show a logical contradiction in their fundamental values and what actions they're taking or advocating, then that would indeed be a logical/rational contradiction, and you can have at it. I'm not convinced you can do this though. For one thing, most people hold multiple values that frequently come into conflict, and when they do their choice between them is extremely difficult to rationally parse, but extremely easy for them to rationalize (and these are two very different things). It's also very difficult to untangle the distinction in order to show any actual contradiction. It also seems to me that if you were going to get there, at least with rabbit, you would've gotten there by now. You guys have discussed this subject... like... a whole lot.

I'm certainly not saying that one can 'prove' that values are correct. They are subjective, of course. But harm is ALWAYS a bad thing, and if you can avoid harm without incurring some kind of cost (even if that cost is merely a deprivation), then most rational people would always choose (for themselves) to avoid the harm and not take the unnecessary risk for a purely conjectural 'reward' that would never have been missed in its absence.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that one needs to be religious in order to value life. But denying people the right to bodily autonomy (as in abortion, right to die, sexuality) usually has a basis in religion. What I'm actually arguing is that saying that the social value of life reins supreme over any other ethical considerations (consent, bodily autonomy, intellectual freedom) is akin to a religious creed. And yes, you can value life over consent to the extent that you'll metaphorically run up a credit card debt and then force someone else to spend a lifetime trying to pay off that debt (which can never be paid off, because you can never eliminate needs and desires), but to do so would make you extremely selfish.

It's irrational to suggest that you can consent on anyone else's behalf, because that isn't how consent works. Sometimes it is necessary to make a contingency based decision on behalf of someone who is comatose or is unconscious, but in that situation, you're trying to figure out what would be the less risky option and what option would be consistent with that person's values. But there's no imaginable contingency under which you would need to bring someone into existence, when you know that there is no risk or harm in the decision of refraining from bringing them into existence, and you have absolutely no idea what the person's values will be if born.

I would argue that it's impossible to rationalise the idea that we're doing someone else a favour by bringing them into existence and waiving the requirement of consent, even when the person would never know if you had refrained from taking the risk.

Harm is only always a bad thing if you're defining harm as whatever someone subjectively finds to be a bad thing, in which case it's basically just true by a defininitional tautology, and people risk harm constantly for purely conjectural rewards... sometimes not GOOD conjectural rewards (that's the only way to explain many of the videos that end up on a show like Ridiculousness).

Thing is, I'd argue that most of religion has its roots in evolutionary psychology. One reason stuff like abortion and suicide are frowned on is because larger societies are stronger than smaller ones (smaller ones are constantly threatened with annihilation), and every individual is more important to the survival and continuation of the group. Individuals might value something like consent, but evolutionarily speaking that's less important to survival and reproduction than, well, survival and reproduction. So the reason many value life more than consent likely has deeper roots than just religion.

I don't really want to get into the rest, except to say that, again, it's not innately irrational to say that we're not going to transfer our consent values onto those not living and that the decision rests with the (potential) parents. All I'm saying is that you can easily arrive at anti-natalism or, errr, natalism rationally depending on what values you start with.