feotakahari | Dec. 8th, 2018

Dec. 8th, 2018

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I’m not going to name the source for this post, because s/he’s taken more than enough mockery already. I’m just gonna quote it so I can dissect it.

“This might be an unpopular opinion, and obviously everyone should be arrested and prosecuted equally, and I get that is the point here, but you could also… not do illegal drugs? Wait for it to be legal or if its really that important to you that you would risk ending up in this situation, move somewhere where it already is.”

I see this argument in so many different forms, from “if you don’t want to risk unplanned pregnancy, stop having unprotected sex” to “if you don’t want to risk arrest under sodomy laws, stop having sex with other men.” It’s always treated as an end point, something you can’t respond to that will automatically win the argument. It never actually works that way, though, because people don’t stop.

Take teen pregnancy as an example. Educators across America have been pushing abstinence as the best way to not get yourself pregnant. Considering the failure rate for most forms of birth control, this is a pretty good idea. (The pill doesn’t count for much when you keep forgetting to take it.) But between 1995 and 2010, the nationwide percentage of teenage girls who stated they were virgins only went from 49% to 57%. I’ll avoid any speculation on reasons, but the fact remains that abstinence can’t be the only thing we push.

I see this argument as the purest expression of why deontology doesn’t work. Once you’ve created a rule for what people should do, it’s easy to divorce yourself from what people actually do. Reality should never be irrelevant to the decisions you make and the aspersions you cast.

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A problem in philosophy textbooks: A small number of people fight in an arena for the entertainment of the masses. Some of these fighters are injured or die. Is it moral to end the fights and deprive the masses of their entertainment?

A problem we’re currently facing: Football players give themselves brain damage for the entertainment of the masses. What methods, ranging from improved safety techniques to bans on particular tactics, should be used to minimize injury?

A problem in philosophy textbooks: Several people have been murdered, and a mob is seeking vengeance. People will die if they’re not satisfied. Is it moral to accuse some random stranger of the crime, letting him be killed so others won’t be?

A problem we’re currently facing: People are murdered by terrorists, and the public demands protection. This may involve anything from bombing the living hell out of random uninvolved brown people, to outreach and awareness in communities where terrorists might be recruited, to bribing known terrorists so they’ll spill info on their colleagues. What actions should be taken to ensure that citizens both feel safe and are safe?

A problem in philosophy textbooks: a trolley is out of control and will kill six people. You can pull a lever to redirect it, killing one person. Do you pull the lever?

A problem we’re currently facing: Hospitals need funds to treat their patients. Police need funds to try to reduce the crime rate. Funds are needed for pollution cleanup, for fire prevention, for schools, for supporting the unemployed, for everything you can imagine. How should we distribute the money? For that matter, what moral values should we use to determine the best way of distributing the money?

This is one of the reasons I don’t put much stock in ethics thought experiments. The typical approach is to create an extreme situation, without any room for alternate approaches, and then say the code of ethics that’s “right” is the one that gives the most normal, everyday answer. But those aren’t the questions that matter. Regardless of what values you follow, the questions you need to address are the ones you actually have to deal with.

“Your baby is tied to a timebomb. You have the terrorist. He tells you you have 1 hour. Do you #torture him to find your baby or let it die?”–Lee Hurst

This is known as the ticking time bomb scenario. The most common formulation is that the bomb will destroy a city, which is less personal and easier to evaluate. If Hurst has no objections, let’s work with that instead. (If Hurst does have objections, let’s work with that anyway.)

Assuming I’m certain of success and there’s no other solution, I would laud torturing a terrorist to prevent a bomb from destroying a city. Lee Hurst can have that one.

Assuming I’m certain of success and there’s no other solution, I would laud torturing a terrorist’s young child to prevent a bomb from destroying a city. Let’s give Hurst that one, too.

Assuming I’m certain of success and there’s no other solution, I would laud killing half a city to prevent a bomb from destroying the whole city. Let’s throw that in Hurst’s face.

This is what you get when you draw your moral dilemmas too narrowly. In the world we actually live and act in, you’re not certain you can torture anything out of this person in the span of one hour. In the real world, you also don’t know that there’s no other way you or anyone else could possibly find the bomb. And from past history, there’s a very high chance that real-world you doesn’t even know if the person you’re torturing has any information about where the bomb is located! Real-world you doesn’t know if, once they tell you where the bomb is, they’re lying to bait you into wasting time and resources. Real-world you doesn’t know if they’re making up the first location that comes to mind so you’ll stop torturing them for at least a little while. Odds are that when real-world you is arguing about whether folks over at Guantanamo should be allowed to torture people, real-world you has never been present at a torture session and never seen what torturers actually do.

So if you’re going to argue for torture, don’t pretend this is an episode of 24. Talk about what’s actually happening in the world we live in, because that’s where prisoners in many countries are currently being tortured while you argue your hypotheticals.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a classic among heavy-handed allegories. Guardians of the Flame is a cult classic at best, most notable for being the codifier of the “trapped in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign” cliche. But a single scene in Guardians answers questions Omelas never bothered to ask, and I believe it holds the key to why the society in Omelas is wrong.

Omelas needs little in the way of a plot summary, inasmuch as it has little in the way of a plot. It proposes a society in which every person save one is happy and content, but that one lives in pain and agony. Without that one’s suffering, it would not be possible for the others to live so happily. Most people accept this, but a few choose to leave the city rather than live under such a contract.

A scene in Guardians finds the protagonist in the sewage pit of a wealthy and opulent city. Living so finely produces a tremendous amount of waste, enough to overflow the pit were it not somehow disposed of. In place of laborers, a single baby dragon is chained in the pit, forced to burn away the waste day and night so that it does not drown in sewage. The people of the city seldom go near the dragon, nor do they listen to what he has to say. But the protagonist breaks the dragon’s chains, letting him free and allowing the city streets to fill with waste.

Omelas is light and airy, a thought experiment without context. There’s no explanation of why one person needs to suffer, because an explanation isn’t the point. Guardians, by contrast, is grounded in knowledge of exactly what’s happening and exactly why it’s tolerated. This means that Guardians can make a point Omelas isn’t equipped to discuss: creating utility is not the same as moving utility around.

Maybe you would be unhappy if you had to pick fruit in the hot sun. But if someone else picks the fruit for you to eat, their utility loss doesn’t become zero just because it isn’t your utility loss. It’s not necessarily a gain in utility if someone other than you washes your clothes, or if someone other than you cooks the food that you eat. You’re not assembling your own iPhone or mining the diamond for your wedding ring, but you still have to remember that there are actual human beings doing those tasks, and that it matters whether those people are exploited.

There’s no solution for Omelas, but Guardian’s city is fixable, and that starts with letting the streets flood. When the citizens are reminded that waste exists, they can discuss why there’s so much waste and how to have less of it. There will always be some waste that needs to be burned, but if citizens of the community are burning it, there can be an actual discussion about how much waste should be made and what level of consumption will lead to the most total happiness. It’s not as tidy and out-of-sight as a chained dragon, but it means no one has to suffer as much as the dragon had to suffer–and maybe, just possibly, our own lowest-paid laborers don’t need to be as poor and ill-cared-for as they currently are.

(Side note: this is one of the few points where I see eye to eye with Jessa Crispin. She makes some great points about how “self-care feminism” often means paying poor people a pittance to care for you, then pretending you don’t have or need support from anyone else.)

The Case of the Speluncean Explorers is a brilliant exploration of what the law should do and what purpose it serves, and I urge you to go read it right now.

Finished? Good.

A lot of the things I could say about this story have already been said by wiser minds than me, but I want to pick at a specific argument by Justice Foster. His statements are convoluted and don’t lend themselves to direct quotation, but the gist is that you can’t punish people for breaking the law when the law was incapable of protecting them. In a normal situation, there are all manner of social institutions meant to preserve life and prevent situations where killing is necessary. None of those were available in an isolated cave, and killing turned out to be the only way any of the explorers could get out alive. In Foster’s terms, the “social compact” failed them, so they had to make up their own rules to survive long enough to return to society.

This may make intuitive sense at first glance, and it’s part of the basis behind self-defense laws. When someone’s coming at you with a knife, you may not have the time or the opportunity to call the police and resolve the situation without violence. The explorers had time to think, but starvation would have come for them long before the forces of law and order could, and their killing of Whetmore could be considered a necessary defense of their lives.

Now consider a different case. In Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman, the narrator relates the story of a group of people on a sinking boat. They don’t have enough life jackets for everyone, so a child gets to grab one first. An adult steals the child’s life jacket and lets her drown. He’s convicted of depraved-heart murder, and the narrator views this as a just consequence of his actions.

There are obvious differences between the two cases. As a Utilitarian, I have my own view on which differences matter, just as you may have yours. I simply wish to argue that Foster’s view is incomplete. If you think that the man on the boat deserved to be convicted, then there must be some moral principle that applies even when the law can’t save you and there’s no one you can rely on.

If it seems like I bash on property rights a lot, it’s because I’ve never been able to properly fit them into Utilitarianism. I’m against reducing utility, but property rights are often about when and whether utility should be moved around.

To be fair, stealing inherently reduces social order and security. You can’t feel comfortable saving money if you expect that this money may someday be stolen. It’s also true that people who steal from “the wealthy” are often stealing from people who are also economically struggling (e.g. poor people in Nigeria who think they’re morally justified in ripping off poor people in America, because Americans must be capable of recovering from financial loss, right?) I also have no particular grudge against wealthy people, and there are people who put their wealth to good use helping others.

On the other hand, I can’t reasonably argue that a dollar for a man who has a million dollars is worth as much as a dollar for a man who only has one dollar. If you can’t afford to pay your rent, having just a little more money means a big increase in your happiness. If you’re in a stable position and have satisfied your basic needs, there are only so many things you can do with a little more money in order to become happier. In that sense, free trade commonly produces situations in which resources are not optimally distributed for maximum happiness.

This doesn’t mean I’m encouraging you to go out and try to be Robin Hood. It’s admirable to be Galileo, but a lot of the people I’ve seen invoke Galileo have been misusing and abusing him. And while I admire Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts to be a “gadfly” and create situations where people were forced to acknowledge and think about racism, a lot of the people on Tumblr who try to imitate his style go too far. Yet still, if you want to go rip off Martin Shkreli, I can’t really argue that you’re doing the wrong thing. Just create more utility with the money than he is.

Side note 1: This is where I really struggle with Internet piracy. Assume you have finite spending money for either a restaurant or a video game. I can argue that pirating the video game is immoral because the game developers might go out of business. But I can also argue that buying the game is immoral, because not spending money at the restaurant may make the restaurant go out of business. Maybe Utilitarianism just isn’t meant to handle artificial scarcity.

Side note 2: In theory, a progressive income tax redistributes money from the rich to programs that can help the poor. Since the tax is expected, it doesn’t reduce social order. Good luck trying to close all the loopholes in the current American tax code, though.

There’s a book called The Lathe of Heaven that’s about how Utilitarianism is bad and wrong. (More directly, it’s about how trying to overwrite reality with dreams will turn everyone’s skin gray and make aliens invade the moon, but the general message is that Utilitarianism is bad and wrong.) The Standard Utilitarian Villain has a monologue about how if you found someone dying of snakebite on the side of the road, and you had antivenom, you would save them. The protagonist responds that the person you saved might go on to kill four people, and you have no way of knowing whether you did the right thing or not.

Besides making me hope Ursula K. Le Guin never finds me dying of snakebite, this argument disappoints me in its neglect of probability. It’s possible from your perspective that the dying person is a murderer, and it’s also possible that they’re not. But if we assume that less than 25% of randomly chosen people will kill four other people, then saving the dying person is a net gain.

I believe all ethics relates back to probability, although most ethical systems do their best to hide their work. A rule saying “don’t lie” comes from a background in which lying repeatedly had negative results, and the probabilities worked out in favor of telling the truth. On the other hand, a community that repeatedly had negative interactions with the outside world might create the rule “don’t trust outsiders,” with lying and misleading outsiders as the tactic supported by probability. But these rigid rules lack the flexibility of an approach that directly considers probability in the moment. The more room you have to consider everything that relates to the case at hand, the better your chances at making the right choice. (Is the dying person carrying a bloody axe? But what if it’s blood from the snake–is there a dead snake nearby? And do you know anything about why they were on this road in the first place?)

Utilitarianism is not a moral system for making the right choice, in that it’s a system that acknowledges that you don’t know the right choice. It’s a system for making choices that are moderately more likely to be right, and will hopefully add up over time. As a Utilitarian, there will be times when you screw up and make the world worse! All you can do is make a judgment and take a gamble.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is a book I both suspect and fear is right. Suspect because it matches my experience, and fear because it means this entire blog is a waste of my time.

Haidt’s argument, which he supports through studies, is that human beings do not create logical arguments before they decide whether something is moral or immoral. Each person has various “tastebuds” that react to the nature of a specific action, and these determine whether your emotional reaction is positive or negative. If it “tastes bad” to you, you’ll try to create a logical argument for why it’s wrong, but you’ll keep insisting it’s wrong even if all your arguments are proven false.

As an example, suppose you’re told the story of someone who used an old flag to clean a toilet. If your “tastebuds” say that disrespecting tradition is bad, you’ll immediately decide that this is wrong, regardless of any logic involved. If you don’t have a “tastebud” for disrespecting tradition, you won’t see a problem at all. To the “tasteful” person, the “tasteless” seems blind, while to the “tasteless” person, the “tasteful” person is reacting to nothing.

Haidt outlines six scales, but observes that different people put different values on different scales. According to his research, people who are very liberal often value only one scale, care vs. harm. (In other words, Utilitarianism.) People who are very conservative often value all six, and they rank care vs. harm lower than other scales like authority vs. subversion. Hence why conservatives have so many values that make no sense to liberals, and why they’re so baffled that liberals don’t share those values.

From there, Haidt does a stupid, stupid thing. He jumps from describing what is true (different values exist) to saying what he thinks should be true (all values should be equally treasured.) He says conservatives are the ones with the right morality, and liberals have it all wrong because their morality is incomplete. David Hume rolls over in his grave as yet another philosopher flings himself headlong into the is-ought gap.

Myself, I go the opposite route. Utilitarianism places its value on a scale that almost everyone agrees is important. It creates a common ground for what people say “ought” to be true, which they can build off of without having to jump across what “is” true. If you and I both think that it ought to be true that people are made happy, and I say that marriage rights make gay people happy, you can at least understand where I’m coming from. But if you say that it ought to be true that people respect religion, and your religion says it’s wrong for gay people to marry–well, I can’t help but find that statement to be in questionable taste.

You may be familiar with Saint Anselm’s argument that God must exist because God is by definition perfect, and things that exist are more perfect than things that don’t. I believe I’ve identified a variant, rarely expressed but often implied as an underlying assumption: God must be important because God is by definition awe-inspiring, and things that are important are more awe-inspiring than things that are not.

To try to explain my own logic here, I believe that the absolute basis of morality is not something that can be objectively proved. If you have a basic idea of what’s moral, you can think logically about how that would be applied in different situations. And if you and I share a basic idea of what’s moral, we can use that to build shared principles. But if your basic idea of what’s moral is fundamentally different from mine, all I can say is that your idea horrifies me and I wouldn’t want to live in a society based around it. I can’t “prove you wrong” in a logical sense.

This is not a belief I share with people who believe in divine command morality, nor is it an idea they typically understand when I try to explain it. As far as they’re concerned, what’s moral is what God says because God is the one who said it. When I try to get them to explain where they’re coming from, they fall back on an argument from authority: God is like a father or a king, so what God says is more important than what you say, just like what your father or your king says is more important than what you say.

Besides invoking my intense dislike of fathers and kings, this argument sidesteps the issue of why this “God” person is important in the first place. I don’t inherently or objectively place moral value on anyone, whether they’re a god or not. I subjectively value them based on my own inclinations. Saying “this necessarily must be important” is no more logical or sensical than “this necessarily must exist,” and it has no value in a serious discussion.

(I have seen another, more logical variant of this: “God is smarter than you and wants you to be happy, so if you want to be happy, you should listen to what God says.” My only response to this is that if God wants me to be happy, he’s not doing a very good job of it.)

I give a lot of reasons for why I’m a Utilitarian. To be honest, only one of them really matters. I flip out easily at the concept of acceptable loss of human life.

Don’t get me wrong. I recognize that you don’t always have the power, resources, knowledge, or opportunity to save everyone. Sometimes all you can do is help a few people, because you don’t have any better ideas for how to help more. I don’t begrudge anyone for doing the best they can with what they can.

But when loss of life is accepted, it’s so often planned into perpetuity. When a serpent handler dies from snakebite, newspapers interview his or her congregation. They always take it in stride, because God must have wanted him or her to die then, and they continue these practices in full knowledge that more people will die from them in the future. Avoidable death becomes just another part of the cycle, and they lose track of the idea that living has value.

Or compare the proud patriot who thinks American soldiers must constantly fight to stop terrorists. Wars aren’t to be questioned, because saying they were unnecessary denigrates the soldiers who died for them. War becomes an ongoing background, something that will never end and should never be expected to end, and flag-draped coffins are a part of the cycle.

People die all the time, and rarely for the right reasons. People died to dig the Panama Canal, and people are dying to build soccer stadiums in Qatar. People die because they had no food, or water, or shelter, or simply because no one cared enough to help them. Then the people who lived come up with reasons why others dying was actually okay, and why the systems that killed them should be kept in place. But at the very least, we can plan for fewer deaths this time than last time. We can look at how and why people died, and we can decide what to do differently to reduce the toll.

That’s why I’m a Utilitarian, because we strive for the greatest good, not just the same amount of good we’ve always had. Sometimes we screw up, and sometimes we run out of options. But if we have any wisdom at all, we don’t say this is just the way things are.

Originally written as a response to this post.

This interests me, because I was also bullied in school, and I turned out very untrusting of social contracts in general.

At the school I went to, there was always one student in each class who was the unofficial designated victim. So long as the bullies only targeted this one student, they would never be punished or made to stop, and the victim would often be punished if they tried to speak up. I think my homeroom teacher chose me because of my different cultural background–I wasn’t used to figurative language and commands phrased as questions, and she interpreted my misunderstanding as deliberate defiance and mockery. When I left, my friend switched to being the new victim because she wore cheap clothes, and I’ve heard of other victims who probably had behavioral disorders.

To be clear, there were students who would have at least attempted to be bullies in any school. But in a healthier environment, they would have been made to stop, as opposed to only being reprimanded when they targeted students other than me. And in a healthier environment, students who were nice and friendly wouldn’t have internalized the idea that bullying me was okay. Even if they never showed any inclination towards bullying, they still targeted me sometimes, because they were acting within a social structure where bullying me seemed like a fun and harmless thing to do.

In retrospect, I suppose I could have distinguished between explicit and implicit contracts like OP did. But that was never a thought that crossed my mind! To me, the system that allowed me to be bullied was a social contract, just as if the teachers had created an explicit rule saying “It’s okay to bully Feo.” Instead, I dug into the idea of the students who bullied me despite not normally being bullies, and the ways in which their normal instinct not to be bullies was stifled. I wouldn’t learn the term until years later, but I was trying to build a moral code that would be resistant to the Lucifer effect.

This is how someone who’s fundamentally against sacrificing one person for the good of the many arrived at Utilitarianism, which is so often criticized for allowing the sacrifice of one person for the good of the many! When you take it for granted that any system of specific rules can potentially lead to sacrificing someone, and that people won’t even consider it a bad thing so long as the sacrifice follows the rules, then the only thing you’re left with is a system where sacrificing people is always worse than helping everyone.

In retrospect, I wonder how I would have turned out if I’d concluded that we just needed explicit rules saying that bullying was always wrong. I don’t think that’s a conclusion I would come to now, though. There are people in this world who are very good at interpreting rules to mean whatever they want to mean, and there are other people who listen to their interpretation and think following that interpretation means they must be morally pure. The only thing I can think of to do is to take their rules away.

Spun off from here.

“ I propose to use the same standard to identify the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. The deserving poor are those who can’t take - and couldn’t have taken - reasonable steps to avoid poverty. The undeserving poor are those who can take - or could have taken - reasonable steps to avoid poverty.”–Bryan Caplan

It would be very easy for me to die in a way that would win me a Darwin Award, and I would not realize I was doing so until it was too late.

For instance, I once read about a Darwin Award winner who saw a waterfall with a sign by it that said “IF YOU GO IN THE WATER, YOU WILL DIE.” Presumably, he must have figured that the sign must have been put up because people went in the deep part of the water and died. The shallows looked safe, so obviously, the people who put up the sign were just being cautious. This is exactly how I would think, and I would be just as surprised as he was when he went in the water and died.

Now, if you were to say that I’d “deserve” to die for that, there’s nothing I could say to argue you out of your point. “Deserving” is not an objective concept, so I can’t make objective statements about it. But I can objectively state that I have no idea how I would stop being a person who thinks in ways that might earn me a Darwin Award someday. Every so often, just far enough apart that I’ve stopped being wary, I put together enough information to come to a catastrophically wrong conclusion. I am dependent upon the rules and safeties other people create to mitigate the potential impact of my poor decision-making.

Subjectively, I think I’m a pretty decent person. I go to work and make my bosses happy, and I go home and make my mother happy. The world would not find itself greatly impoverished by my death, and you could name any number of people who deserve to live more than I do, but I still value this life, and I take threats to it quite seriously–even threats through implication.

In a philosophy class I once took, one of the students said that Kantian ethics seems to encourage you to act like a superhero. Given the choice between lying or letting an innocent person die, the most Kantian action would be to tell the truth, then swoop into action and save the person anyway. The teacher had a fondness for Kant, and interrupted him before he could say much, but I think he was onto something.

Superman, in terms of powers, is a character who can solve problems any way he wants. He has the capability to defeat villains without killing them, or the capability to kill everyone who stands in his way. This means that whatever he does or doesn’t do is limited by the decisions he makes and the sort of person he is.

In many continuities, Superman frames himself as everyone’s role model. His job is decide what virtues people should have, then behave in such a way as to inspire people to follow those virtues. He’s universal, even multiversal, inspiring people across the globe, into space, and thousands of years after his death. This means that it’s not enough for him to act according to the situation–he needs to present a model that people can follow all the time. In other words, he needs to act according to maxims that he would will to be universal law!

To the larger world, Superman seems flawless, but his most emotionally powerful scenes tend to involve him connecting to and inspiring flawed human beings. He understands that they can’t always be like him, but they understand that by trying to be like him, they can be better than they currently are. He’s a guidepost, not an endpoint, and his very existence makes the whole world better.

This is the closest I’ve come to respecting Kantian ethics, because it gives me a framework to compare it to my own beliefs. As a Utilitarian, I’ve seen a lot of criticism of how a perfect Utilitarian would need to know everything and accurately predict the outcome of any action. In a similar way, a perfect Kantian would need to be able to do anything and resolve situations while following every virtue. But no one is ever a perfect Utilitarian, and no one is ever a perfect Kantian, either. You simply need to be as good as you can be, with all your flaws and limitations.

If superheroes inspire us, then how exactly does that inspiration take form? In what sense can a person be more like a superhero?

I once read a Spider-Man comic that began with a mugger attacking a woman late at night, when a vigilante suddenly appeared and shot the mugger. It turned into a conflict between Spidey, who wanted to capture criminals, and this mysterious figure who just wanted to kill them. Their encounters ended with the vigilante defeated and apprehended, and Spidey still baffled by the vigilante’s actions. “What was he even trying to do?”

In the final page, another mugger attacked another woman. This time, the woman pulled a gun on the mugger. That was what the vigilante was trying to accomplish–to create an environment in which ordinary people knew they could fight back. People who could never imitate a web-slinging superhero could still imitate an average guy with a gun.

I could take this argument apart pretty easily if I wanted. Guns haven’t done much to make women safer, and when women do defend themselves, they’re charged with murder even when it’s blatantly self-defense. But I find it provocative, if nothing else, and I think it cuts to the heart of some of the problems with superheroes as models of behavior.

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.” –Andre Bauer, arguing that people who fail drug tests shouldn’t get government help to buy food.

Sometimes I blame Superman for the economic right, or at least the ideas behind Superman.

A common question in Superman comics is why Superman doesn’t or can’t save everyone, and the most common answer is that this would make us need saving more often. If Superman intervened every time people got themselves into bad situations, people would take it for granted that he would always intervene. They would stop doing things to protect, defend, or improve themselves, like children who fail to grow because they’re never exposed to adult responsibilities. By, say, refusing to help migrant laborers push back against the employers who exploit them, he’s encouraging those laborers to develop their own strength and solve their own problems. (I wish that was a hypothetical example. Fuck Elliot S! Maggin with a rusty rake.)

A similar question in politics is why the government doesn’t or can’t save everyone, to which conservatives tend to provide a similar answer. Poor people just need to put in more effort to stop being poor, and they won’t bother to do that if being poor isn’t hellish and unlivable. Black people will lose their self-esteem if they get outside support to fight back against bigotry. Immigrants, if there’s value in immigrants at all, need to stand tall and do everything themselves, because the alternative is an unending drain on everyone else’s resources.

I won’t deny that there’s a type of human scavenger who thinks anything they can claim is theirs. There are people who will scam social services because they think money taken is money earned, just as there are people who will let their corporation go into bankruptcy because they know they’re guaranteed a government bailout. But inherent in this mindset is a belief that you’re an independent person making logical choices in order to gather resources for yourself, and most people don’t have that level of self-delusion. People don’t want to be trapped in a cycle of one-way dependency. People don’t want to live in such a way that they will be unable to continue living if their support dries up. People want to stand under their own power, and if they say they need help, that’s usually because it’s the only thing left that they can do.

(This is also a part of why I hate the Prime Directive, but that’s an even longer rant.)

This is an excerpt from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. I post it whenever I want to talk about what religion should be, and what it often is.

A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I’m going to tell you.)

The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. “Is there anyone here,” he says to them, “who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?”

They murmur and say, “We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.”

The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.”

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story, and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.”

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.

As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones.

“Nor am I without sin,” he says to the people. “But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.”

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

Pictured: a fluffy bunny.

Pictured: also a fluffy bunny.

(Source.)

The term is often used to refer to Wiccans who’re doing Wicca “wrong” for whatever reason, especially ones whose interpretation of Wicca is too idealistic. The implication is that true Wicca acknowledges all of existence, and Wiccans who don’t do that aren’t really Wiccans. There are loads of ways to argue this from an inside perspective, and since I’m not a Wiccan, I’m not going to wade into that. But from the outside, there’s one thing I can say: I like fluffy bunnies.

The serious Wiccan, as quite a few Wiccan thinkers will tell you in excruciating detail, believes that “light” and “dark” are both natural parts of the universe, to the extent they can be considered separate at all. Problems arise when imbalance is created, but too little suffering is just as much of an imbalance as too much. Scott Cunningham, for instance: “From a ravaging flood comes rich soil in which new plants thrive. Death brings a deeper appreciation of life to the living and rest for the transcended one. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are often identical in nature, depending on one’s viewpoint.”

The fluffy Wiccan believes that suffering is bad, because suffering is bad.

This is not unique to Wicca. The more concerned you are with following every precept of the Bible, the more disconnected you are from the values Jesus espoused, and some of the most obnoxious people I’ve ever interacted with have been Buddhists who got way too into living their lives by Buddhist standards. For that matter, the dedicated Utilitarian will argue for hours over whether a particular action results in more or less utility, while the casual Utilitarian can often see immediately that it’s the wrong thing to do.

So if you ever run into a knotty problem that you can’t fit into your beliefs, cut the knot. The rules you’ve been following can guide you, but you shouldn’t let them blind you to what’s actually in front of you and what your instincts are telling you to do.

(I say this, knowing full well that a normal human being would not agree to some of the moral principles I espouse. What can I say? When you’re as far into Blue as I am, everyone else is Orange.)

I avoid casting judgment on abortion, because it’s not a concept Utilitarianism was built to handle.

Suppose aborting a fetus decreases utility, because that fetus would have grown up to have a happy life. By the same token, aren’t you decreasing utility by not getting pregnant in the first place? This would seem to obligate people to keep having children up until the point where having children decreases total happiness, and that would create a lot of unhappiness for people who aren’t equipped to raise children or simply don’t want to.

Now suppose aborting a fetus increases utility, whether because the child won’t have a happy life, or for any other reason that gets away from the previous problem. Is killing the infant at birth, as some cultures do, any less moral than simply aborting? What if you’ve raised a child for five years, but realize you’ve made a mistake that will decrease total happiness–rather than continuing to raise the child, is it better to immediately kill it?

I once saw immanentizingeschatons and fnord888 trying to resolve this problem. They talked about “population ethics” and “counterpart theory” and lots of other phrases I’d never heard before, but it didn’t look like they were making much headway. Personally, I just stay out of the way. If you judge that an abortion is the right thing to do in your case, then I figure you know more about your life and your values than I do.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

There was another post on Fandom Secrets about how otherkin are crazy and we shouldn’t be normalizing them. As usual, people responded with posts about how fictionkin are crazy, and as usual, people responded to those posts with posts about how people with DID are crazy and should be “treated.”

There’s a lot I could dig into about the different conflations various posters made, and the ways in which they assumed particular traits existed across every single member of the groups they discussed. But for now, I want to assume a system with almost every trait they discussed. Some members are otherkin, some are fictionkin, they believe in reincarnation, they believe in parallel universes, etc. Should this system be treated differently compared to “everyday” people? And what factors do you use to judge how to treat them?

I’m all about boundaries, so I’ll bring out one specific post in that thread:

“My crazy abusive ex was part of the mpd/did and -kin community. And I used to be friends with a few people who were basically FF7 House, except with slightly different fandoms.

“Holy fuck it’s amazing how many of these people are absolute manipulative pieces of shit. I will never not consider it anything but a cult. Yeah, I met a couple who were legitimately nice people who knew they had a serious mental illness / weird coping mechanism. (Amazingly, they all stayed on the ragged fringe of the community bc admitting you have a problem and trying to fix it so you can live a normal life isn’t exactly popular in a cult.) But far too many of them were full-on Join Us or Die. And these weren’t confused teens, these were adults.

“They take young, fucked-up kids who need help and support, and instead use that confusion and isolation against them. The reason you don’t have friends and your family abuses you is bc you’re Special, you’re the fucking Moon Princess. And all you have to do to get “friends” and a community where you belong and an explanation for your fucked up head is to admit that you aren’t really you.

“And of course, it can’t just stop at pretending to be something on the internet. All of these community leaders are ‘out’, so maybe this young person feels like they should be out too. So they out themselves as some crazy shit to their family and friends and of course no one understands, which isolates them further. And because so many of that subculture are mentally ill, it give the manipulative abusers tons of easy fodder.”

Personally, I have never talked to anyone who told me I was a wolf. No one has ever told me I’m Sephiroth, or an elf, or psychically linked to hobbits on the astral plane. That’s why I can get along with otherkin and fictionkin. I don’t believe what they believe, but I probably believe tons of things they think are silly, too.

But every time I see an account of otherkin and fictionkin being absolute jackasses, it always starts with some troubled young person being told they, too, were otherkin or fictionkin. And for that matter, I’ve read about disgraced psychologists who made up DID diagnoses and then controlled their patients’ lives to “treat” them. I can’t argue that all recruiters are abusers, but at the very least, abusers like to recruit.

If I may go broader, this is the distinction I make for all sorts of things I don’t believe in. The religious fanatic doesn’t just believe God wants things from him; he believes God wants things from me, and by not doing those things, I’m going against the will of God. The conspiracy theorist believes the conspiracy controls not just the world she lives in, but the world I live in as well, and conversely, I believe the global warming denier’s continued pollution affects my world as well as his. Only from an anti-vaxxer do I not accept “Well, you can vaccinate your kids and I won’t vaccinate mine,” and that’s because I’m sickly and can’t take some vaccines.

L.B. Lee linked me to an essay about theories of selfhood and the morality of DID therapy. This is priceless, and not in a good way:

“I can detect little concern within the psychiatric community, or indeed the general public, over the ethical probity of restoration and integration. To the best of my knowledge, no discussion of moral status has even raised the question of whether alters might qualify for a right to continued existence. But proponents of the purely psychological accounts of full moral status ‒ accounts that tend to deny neonates a right to continued existence ‒ would be committed to condemning integration and restoration should the strong model it seems, be vindicated. On the face of it, this would appear to be an objection to such accounts of full moral status.”

This is what I’m imagining here:

“I can detect little concern within the slaveholding community, or indeed the general public, over the ethical probity of slaveholding. To the best of my knowledge, no discussion of moral status has even raised the question of whether slaves might qualify for a right to freedom. But proponents of the purely psychological accounts of full moral status would be committed to condemning slavery should the model be vindicated. On the face of it, this would appear to be an objection to such accounts of full moral status.”

If you’re gonna reach a moral conclusion, then fucking own it.

Among my social circle, people tend to assume the reason someone’s anti-gay is that they think Leviticus 18 tells them to be anti-gay. We regularly pass around the counterargument that Leviticus says all kinds of other things, like not to wear jewelry or cut the hair on the sides of your head. We treat it as an instant win condition–if you say that people don’t follow the other proscriptions in Leviticus, then as far as we’re concerned, you’ve won any possible argument over whether people should be anti-gay.

I once tried that on a person who was actually anti-gay. He started telling me about the three different kinds of laws in Leviticus and how to tell which ones modern Christians are and aren’t allowed to ignore. I looked this up, and I still think he was talking bullshit, but it was bullshit that took a lot more thought and effort to take apart.

Conversely, try spending some time on an anti-evolution website. They have a lot of simple, logical-sounding arguments that are treated as instant win conditions against evolution (e.g. “how could wings evolve when partly-evolved wings are useless for flying?”) If you’ve done a lot of reading about evolution, you can find theories that address these issues. But explaining these theories takes time, and someone who expected to instantly win the argument will probably be frustrated with you “evading the issue.”

Obviously, my perspective on these issues is skewed because I believe in evolution and am not anti-gay. But either way you frame it, I think it’s important to recognize that other people have probably thought about the same issues you’re bringing up.

Note 1: This probably ties into Turning Verbal Traps Into Honest Questions, although that’s more about how to frame the argument than about whether the argument has been properly thought through.

Note 2: For the bonus round, try to find and take apart these sorts of arguments in anarchist vs. socialist vs. capitalist socioeconomic disagreements. The instant win conditions fly fast and thick from every side.

I’m feeling lazy lately, so let’s pick on someone who’s a thousand years too dead to fight back.

This is Saint Anselm’s argument for why God must exist, as copied from Wikipedia:

By definition, God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.
A being that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a being that does not necessarily exist.
Thus, by definition, if God exists as an idea in the mind but does not necessarily exist in reality, then we can imagine something that is greater than God.
But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God.
Thus, if God exists in the mind as an idea, then God necessarily exists in reality.
God exists in the mind as an idea.
Therefore, God necessarily exists in reality.

This is a very easy argument to parody, e.g. Gaunilo’s “perfect island”, but it’s much harder to disprove. Writers as recent as Bertrand Russell had a hard time explaining exactly why it’s wrong.

To take my own crack at it, I’d like to start by limiting proposition 6:

“A being that is or resembles God exists in the mind as an idea.”

The being in your mind may not be a perfect representation of what God is! God isn’t necessarily a bearded old man, or a dark-skinned young woman, or three circles of yellow light rotating through each other that are somehow all the same circle. If there is a God, He exists regardless of whatever frame of reference you can or can’t fit God into.

This does not undermine propositions 1 or 2. For the purposes of this argument, I cede that if there is a God, there is nothing greater than Him, and that any human idea of what God might be cannot be greater than the actual God.

From here, proposition 3 is looking less and less relevant. If we don’t know whether the idea in our heads is God, how can we evaluate whether it’s lesser or greater than God? We would have to compare it to some guaranteed accurate idea of what God is like, and we can’t be sure we have that! To salvage anything from proposition 3, it needs to be reworked:

“If God exists in reality, then the real God is greater than any godlike being that only exists in the mind.”

Even from here, there’s no logical way to get to proposition 7! All we’ve proved is a point of linguistics:

“A being that does not exist in reality cannot be called God.”

Anselm’s trick, as I see it, was switching from talking in hypotheticals (“This is what God would be like if I observed Him”) to talking as if he’s seen God and taken observations (“This is what God is like.”) In effect, Anselm hid the hypothetical behind a curtain and pretended to have created observations from nothing.

(The last time I went into this, I was told Kant had the same idea centuries ago in his Critique of Pure Reason. I looked it up, and it’s way above my experience level. I think the argument there is that proposition 2 is begging the question by assuming there’s such a thing as “necessary existence.”)

The free world… all of Christendom… is at war with Islamic horror. Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter. Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all.

-Congressman Clay Higgins, U.S. House of Representatives, 3rd District of Louisiana

If I lived in a country run by Muslims, I’d probably care a lot more when people argued about whether Islam is a bad thing.

If I lived in a country where Muslims wrote the laws, I’d have to care what the Muslims in question considered punishable by death. For that matter, I’d have to care whether they believed in the death penalty at all! I’d have to care whether they let women go out without a hijab, or what they did to women convicted of adultery. But I live in a country where Christians write the laws, and if I’m ever put to death, it will most likely be by Christians.

If I lived in a country where Muslims directed the culture, I’d have to care what they considered inappropriate. I’d have to care if people discriminated against me for not praying, or if they thought it was un-Islamic to drink alcohol. It would matter to me if people disliked my fiction for going against Muslim values, or if they disliked my blog for supporting things good Muslims shouldn’t support. But I live in a country where the culture is set by Christians, and when people who think they’re righteous say things that horrify me, they’re usually quoting what the Bible told them.

If I criticize Christianity a lot, that’s not because I think Christianity is worse than Islam. Nor do I think it’s better, or exactly the same, because I don’t know or care enough to say any of those things. But when people say that America is adopting “Sharia law” or “surrender tactics,” a little research usually reveals that they’ve got the wrong end of the stick. America is a Christian country, no matter how much I wish it weren’t, and when I talk about America, I have no choice but to talk about Christianity.

I’m someone who complains a lot about Christianity, which means I hear a lot from Christians who insist they’re not like those other Christians. Those other Christians are bigots and hypocrites, but not them! And they’re not doing anything to harm me, so why am I saying all this stuff about “Christians” like it applies to all Christians?

Personally, I’m past the point of caring. When I interact with people who’re talking in terms of what Christian moral values ask of them, those interactions are usually negative for me and my friends. If you’re not causing harm to me or my friends, you’re probably not someone who’s pushing Christian moral values in my direction without prompting, so I’m not really interested in whether you’re a Christian or not.

But I also sometimes look at a news site for black people. The news site tends to talk as if the only people in the world are black people and white people, and white people are all complicit in hurting black people. Even news stories about white people trying to help combat racism against black people are framed as the white person wanting attention and brownie points rather than really caring about black people.

When someone (usually a self-described white person) posts that not all white people are like that, the usual response from regular posters is that they don’t care. Their interactions with white people, even white people who claim to be against racism, are often based in bigotry, paternalism, and condescending compassion. If you say you’re a white person who isn’t bigoted, your statement doesn’t do anything to reduce the bigotry they encounter every day.

To be honest, spending any amount of time on that news site pisses me off. I’m of mixed heritage, but most of my experiences with other people are in the context of them thinking of me as white. I’ve had almost every form of white privilege that’s available to someone of my socioeconomic status. But I don’t think I’m as bigoted as they say white people are, and I feel frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be anything I could possibly do to not be seen as part of the problem.

If there’s a distinction I can make, it’s that I don’t care one way or another whether you wear a cross or go to church on Sunday. It’s not directly relevant to me, and I won’t make a big deal out of it unless you get in my face by trying to make me act like a good Christian. But I’m not sure that’s enough of a distinction to keep me from being a hypocrite.

I just figured out how to word the difference between Utilitarianism and several strains of Christianity. Obligatory Not All Christians, but it can be found under enough names that I can’t pin it to any specific denomination.

The standard Christian approach to pain and trauma is “I come to You in pieces so You can make me whole.” (Or alternately phrased, you have a hole in your heart, and you’ll fill your hole with Jesus.) This tends to presume not only that Christianity is necessary to make you whole, and not only that those who are not Christians are not whole, but that people who are whole are all whole in the same way. There is a model of what a Christian should be, and if no human being meets that model, that just means that all human beings are flawed. The closer humans get to overcoming their flaws, the closer they come to being identical in nature and behavior.

(I once saw two people arguing over whether Heaven was a place of self-improvement or a place of peaceful rest. The one who said it was a place of rest told the one who thought it was a place of self-improvement that it was their earthly nature that made them think Heaven could be anything other than a place of rest, and once they ascended to the true perfection of a soul in Heaven, they would see how silly it was to believe that Heaven could be a place of self-improvement. Unspoken was the idea that different people could naturally be suited to different, equally valid Heavens.)

Utilitarianism isn’t well-suited to this approach, since it’s ultimately about happiness, and you can observe that there are people who are different from each other and are happy. Mill went this route by claiming that some forms of happiness are better than others, and it’s possible to argue that people who don’t buy into your particular bugbear aren’t truly happy, but most Utilitarians have to concede that different people need different things. This means that whether you’re “in pieces” depends on whether or not you feel like you’re blocked from being happy. People don’t need to be shaped and standardized, so long as they’re in the shape they want to be.

If you live what you consider to be a Godly life, there isn’t anything wrong with that. What makes you happy is up to you. For that matter, if someone else is unhappy with their life, the sort of life you live may work better for them. But you need to acknowledge that some people will be more happy and fulfilled not trying to be like you.

To be clear, I’m not a Muslim, and I’ve never discussed religion with any of the Muslims I’ve met. I apologize if I’m misunderstanding something here.

There are verses in the Quran that claim the Torah has been misinterpreted and misused. Many Muslims go a step farther: the Torah has been mistranslated. While it still holds truth, that truth has been diluted by retranslation over the centuries. This is one of the reasons so many Muslim thinkers emphasize reading the Quran in the original Arabic, so as to avoid mistranslations that distort the meaning.

For complicated and stupid reasons relating to an X-Men comic, I’m seeing text flying back and forth across Tumblr about Surah 5, Verse 51 of the Quran. Some people think it means that Muslims shouldn’t be friends with people who aren’t Muslims. Other people think it means that Muslims shouldn’t have non-Muslims as leaders. Meanwhile, G. Willow Wilson, who actually knows Arabic, points out (dead link) that the word being used means “legal advisor.”

Courtesy of Lamya H, a verse from the Quran. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the translation:

It is He who has sent down to you the Book; in it are verses precise – they are the foundation of the Book – and others unspecific. As for those in whose hearts is deviation [from truth], they will follow that of it which is unspecific, seeking discord and seeking an interpretation [suitable to them]. And no one knows its [true] interpretation except Allah. But those firm in knowledge say, “We believe in it. All [of it] is from our Lord.” And no one will be reminded except those of understanding.

If anything, it seems a little rosy. Even the parts that are specific can be misused if you can’t keep track of what the words mean!

P.S. I tried looking up Muslim views on the Bible, but I got a lot of conflicting responses. I’ll leave that discussion to actual Muslims.

I used to say that people create the Jesus they need most, imagining their personal Jesus as a reflection of themselves with all their flaws reframed and justified as virtues. I’d like to take it a step farther–people create the world they need most, even if it takes them their whole lifetimes.

Take John C. Wright, a very smart, very arrogant writer who thinks the only possible reason you could disagree with him is that you haven’t read as many books as him. He used to be a strident atheist, and while this gave him plenty of opportunities to be smug, it still felt like he had the capacity to see and understand things about the world that weren’t exactly how he wanted them to be. Then he had a stroke, started hearing the “voice of Jesus” in his head, and redoubled his fervency as a Catholic. He’s found new life and vigor in ranting about how gay people and feminists are ruining the world by going against the will of God, because he now has the ultimate authority to appeal to and the ultimate book to point to when he wants to claim he’s more learned than you. I’m not saying Catholicism is bad, but it was both bad for and necessary to Wright, because it gave him free reign to be what his worst impulses always inclined him towards being.

Or take Tatsuya Ishida, who used to be an offensive but empathetic chronicler of society’s dropouts. His comic Sinfest always carried the feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with society, and a strong implication that this wrongness related to sex, hedonism, and selfishness. However, he was never able to clearly label the problem, so he was never able to blame or ostracize anyone for it. His characters remained lovable even at their lowest points, and they were beginning to form support networks and develop into decent people. Then he discovered feminism, and suddenly his entire comic was about ways in which men dehumanize women. Every issue was reframed in terms of men’s sexism and selfishness, and any attempt at nuance was rejected as a trick to undermine and manipulate women. Feminism let Ishida believe in a world that had an understandable, fixable problem, and if that single problem was too simple to cover the whole world, then the world could simply shrink to fit his understanding. Again, I’m not saying feminism is bad, but it was bad for Ishida, because it gave him what he’d always wanted.

This post was inspired by an article about past-life regression, written by an author who didn’t believe but clearly wanted to. She talked at length about her personal anxieties that could be quelled by the belief in lives before and after this one, and she almost made it sound compelling to set aside the world you know and embrace the world you need. But I can’t help but wonder, if she chose to see what she wanted, are there things she would then become unable to see? And what would that mean for the people around her, if in some way they were part of the unseen?

This list goes from most to least crippling to my ability to say anything intelligent in response. It does not include intentional trolling, only seemingly sincere reactions to which I can say nothing.

1): The subject matter, in and of itself, makes you so angry that I can’t discuss it. For instance, I once encountered someone who described evolution as his “berserk button,” by which he meant that he saw the concept of evolution as inherently and enragingly disrespectful to the perfection of God’s creation. I couldn’t even say the word without pissing him off.

2): You make mental connections in a way that doesn’t match most people, AND you assume everyone else is like you. On the same site, I encountered a fellow who ranked all his moral values in absolute and unchanging order. For instance, if he were to rank honesty more important than kindness, he would deny that there was ever a possible situation in which it was more important to be kind than to be honest. He had no way of understanding that other people didn’t do this, and he’d somehow concluded that making equality an important value would lead to genocide, so any attempt to discuss equality with him would only frighten him with the thought of the genocide I would surely be committing any day now.

3a): You’re starting from basic moral premises that don’t match mine. I’ve never directly spoken to this person, but I’ve seen posts about a person whose only moral principle is that creations owe absolute obedience to their creator. God is the creator of everything, so anything God does is by definition right, disobeying God is by definition wrong, and there exists no higher moral standard than whether God approves or disapproves of something. In theory, I could argue the point by creating my own arguments for what God approves of or disapproves of, but I barely ever think about what God approves of or disapproves of, so he would easily out-argue me through his greater experience in the subject matter.

3b): You bit the bullet so hard it snapped in half. In an argument over abortion rights, I cited the example of a woman whose fetus is already dead and rotting inside her. Someone responded that they still wouldn’t approve of abortion, because God might work a miracle. It’s absurd, but it’s self-consistent, and it forms an unbreakable wall no logic can penetrate.

4a): Your anecdata goes against my argument, and it’s very emotive in nature. For instance, you might base all your arguments about illegal immigration on the anecdote of an illegal immigrant who raped and murdered a teenage girl. I could easily produce a counterexample in the form of an illegal immigrant who did not rape and murder a teenage girl. With a bit of research, I might be able to argue that illegal immigrants who rape and murder teenage girls are a statistical minority. But it’s easy for you to argue that my defenses of illegal immigrants are disrespectful to the teenage girl who was raped and murdered, and any response I could make to this validates the idea that “respect” is the most important factor in the argument. (Even fighting fire with fire, like bringing up an illegal immigrant who was raped and murdered, achieves nothing.)

4b): Your scientific studies go against my argument, and I have no ability to argue that your studies are inaccurate or poorly designed. This is the approach that hits me the hardest, because I rarely know enough to evaluate whether my own pet studies are any better. Either or both of us could be arguing based on sham science, and I’d never be able to tell. This leaves us at a standstill as I politely bow out of the conversation. (On the other hand, if I can tell that your study is poorly designed, I get madder and madder as I try to explain the issue and you tell me I’m just a science denier who doesn’t know when to quit.)

5): I don’t understand how your conclusions logically follow from your stated premises. Let’s go back to example 2 for a moment. This person once told me that, because bottle-fed infants have lower IQs than breast-fed infants, gay men should not be allowed to adopt children. There are clearly a lot of unstated premises involved in that conclusion, but I have no idea what they are, and trying to puzzle them out confused me so much that he won the argument easily. (I’ve started to get better at asking exactly what the missing premises are, but this just makes people angry instead of making them explain.)

I don’t have a conclusion or a solution for this list. But I’d say it covers a good seven-tenths of my arguments on the Internet, and that’s making me run out of steam faster and faster.

Let’s suppose you believe that men should protect and women should be protected. (You probably don’t believe that, if you’re reading my blog, but let’s keep this hypothetical for now.) In this world, there are men who did not protect and women who were not protected. It’s easy to decide what to do with the man: you shame him for being weak. But how do you evaluate the woman? And what do you say to other women who are afraid that if they don’t protect themselves, a man won’t protect them?

In practice, it seems you square this circle by creating rules and restrictions a woman must follow in order to make a man protect her. If a woman was not protected, you say that she must have violated one of those rules, and therefore brought it upon herself. You assure other women that they won’t break the rules, and that they will be protected. That’s why they’re caught off guard when they’re still not protected after following all of your rules.

I don’t know how best to argue with views like this. They tend to grow in directions that make them almost impossible to falsify, such that you could construct a plausible argument for why any victim must have broken a rule. The best I can advise is to keep a watchful eye on any system that claims the righteous are safe from harm.

I saw a Catholic blog describe what they thought “winning” would look like. One of their ideas of a win would be abortion clinics closing down for lack of customers. This is … I tried to think of a more polite phrasing than “detached from reality,” but there doesn’t seem to be a polite way to say that. But it’s detached from reality in a way that doesn’t seem like it’s intentionally malicious. I think it explains both why other people tend to interpret the religious right as genocidal, and why the religious right is always so baffled at the idea that anyone could think they want genocide.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m something of a collector of accounts of pregnancy complications. Sometimes the fetus is already dead and rotting, and the woman risks hemorrhage if she doesn’t abort. Sometimes, the newborn baby won’t be able to breathe outside the womb. I once read about a case where he would live, but would be unable to move his arms and legs and would also have incurable chronic pain.

Let’s be clear; the women who would give birth in these circumstances are not voluntary customers of abortion clinics, in the same sense that I’m not a voluntary customer when I go to the doctor to stop my immune system from ripping me apart from the inside. That’s why they tend to assume that Catholics and other right-wing Christian groups want to punish women for having pregnancy complications. I have seen feminist sites openly state that Christians think women who have fatal pregnancy complications deserved to die.

Except this Christian does not think women who have pregnancy complications should all die. They* think there’s a possible world, with no changes in medical technology, where women don’t want to get abortions at all. The only way I can think of to explain this is that they’re genuinely ignorant that these women exist.**

Now I’m going out on a limb here, because I’ve never seen OP talk about gender issues and have no idea what they think on the subject. But I’ve seen other people who have similar opinions to OP who are very invested in the idea that science supports two binary genders. If a scientist of any stripe argues that gender is not binary, they do their best to argue that the scientist’s credentials are invalid or irrelevant and the argument does not represent mainstream science.

I recently saw a blog post where someone speculated about a possible future where he*** is fired from his job and disallowed from getting Medicare because a DNA test shows he’s intersex. I wanted to grab him and shake him. “These people can’t DNA test you! They can’t live in a world where you are physically and provably intersex! They need to believe that everyone is innately male or female and chooses to defy that!”

I’m not saying these beliefs are harmless. If you think that all people can be straight, you assume responsibility for all the people who killed themselves because they couldn’t be straight. But I think OP lives in a simpler world than I do, and I think if you wanted to argue with OP, you would have to find a way to make their world more complicated.

*No pronouns are listed on their blog.

**I once saw someone say that they oppose abortion of dead fetuses because God might work a miracle. For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to assume this person is not typical.

***I don’t remember the blog name, so I can’t check pronouns, but I do remember OP is male-passing.

I’m going to share a secret that protects you from so many Bad Takes: you don’t have to choose just one person in a moral quandary to be “you.”

I originally got this from Judith Thomson’s “famous violinist” argument, which is meant to prove that abortion is okay. She proposes that “you” wake up one day with a famous violinist plugged into your vital organs, and unless you leave him plugged in for nine months, he will die. From there, she argues that you wouldn’t want to have a famous violinist plugged into your vital organs for nine months, so therefore abortion is okay.

What she never considers is that “you” could wake up one day to discover that you’re a famous violinist who’s plugged into someone’s vital organs and will die unless you stay plugged in for nine months. In the magic of Thought Experiments, where anything can happen, it’s all equally valid! And if you don’t want to be unplugged early and die, then you can argue from there that abortion is wrong.

The real issue here is that “what benefits me personally” is not the sole valid definition of morality. But it’s also useful to remember that “me personally” doesn’t have to be a single fixed entity, and it doesn’t have to be whoever the person making the argument decides it ought to be. It turns out the Veil of Ignorance is actually a useful idea, folks! You can argue from the violinist’s perspective, and the perspective of the person plugged into the violinist, and the lawmaker deciding whether it should be legally required to save the violinist, and the surgeon who would have to “unplug” the violinist, and everyone else who’s relevant!

(See also: a good 50% of the arguments defending the movie Passengers, and maybe 20% defending the video game The Last of Us. “If you were in the protagonist’s position, you would do exactly what he did!” But what if I was in some other position?)

The problem with doing horrible shit as a deterrent is that if you don’t deter anyone, you’re just doing horrible shit.

Assuming a liberal audience, the easiest way to argue this is to gesture in the direction of the anti-immigration crowd. Jeff Sessions will never run out of horrible shit to do to illegal immigrants to “deter” them, and it will never fucking work, because what else are they gonna do, stay in their home countries and wait for the gangs to murder them? Even when the border patrol destroys water supplies so people will die in the desert, sufficiently desperate people will see it as a lower risk than staying.

But a surprisingly large fraction of liberals think doing horrible shit is a deterrent when you do it in wartime. They say that if you murder enough people, no one will want to fight a war with you. This only proves that liberals need to read more fantasy novels, because recruiters and terrorists have clearly been reading them. “Join us to become a hero and avenge all the people our enemies horribly murdered!” The more horrible shit you do, the stupider the things people will do in response, so long as they can fit it into a revenge narrative.

Honestly, I think there’s a cachet factor. People like the idea of being a strong-minded person who makes tough choices, and that means they need to come up with a tough choice that they can take. But before you talk about what must be done for the greater good, you should consider what actually works.

The principle of double effect is based on the idea that there is a morally relevant difference between an “intended” consequence of an act and one that is foreseen by the actor, but not calculated to achieve his motive. So, for example, the principle is invoked to consider the terror bombing of non-combatants having as its goal victory in a legitimate war morally out of bounds, while holding as ethically in bounds an act of strategic bombing that similarly harms non-combatants with foresight as a side effect of destroying a legitimate military target.

“It wasn’t like I intended to blow up that orphanage! It just happened to be nearby!”

Seriously, someone introduce these fuckers to the concept of depraved indifference.

I once tried to read about a guy called Gilbert Ryle who called himself a logical positivist. The only part I managed to understand was that you’re a logical positivist if you’d be willing to undergo surgery with a paralytic drug, a drug that prevents you from forming memories, and no anesthetic. You'd still feel all the pain, but no one would ever be able to prove it, and no future version of yourself or others would show any sign of having seen or experienced it, so by Ryle's standard, it never happened.

I think that’s the principle the American death penalty runs under. No one cares if the dying experience horrible pain. It's just about whether they demonstrate physical signs of pain before they expire, because that might call into question the morality of killing people.

This isn’t gonna be a full Fiction for Utilitarians, because I try to do those for overlooked or forgotten fiction, and Prey is a major new release. I just feel like gushing a little.

The writers of Prey were clearly aware of Utilitarian thought. There are a lot of references to the trolley problem, and the story’s central conflict is very Utilitarian in nature. There are several points where you’re given a moral dilemma and asked to sort it out, and one of your answers is often Utilitarian in nature.

( Read more... )

This is the most Japanese thing I have ever read in my entire life.

( Read more... )

When a story is written to promote a way of living, there’s a very specific formula to how it will go. The protagonist encounters problems, adopts the way of living, and the problems go away because their way of living fixes everything. There’s often another character who follows an inferior way of living, trying and failing to solve the same problem, and they’ll either die or change their minds upon seeing the protagonist succeed. There are a few wrinkles in the formula–the protagonist dies saving everyone, the protagonist loses his love interest because his way of life matters more to him than love–but by and large, any story about how to be a good person and live a good life can be summed up in this way.

As a Utilitarian, I naturally have a grudge about how this tends to play out. It’s the tragic villains who tend to espouse Utilitarian values, doing something horrible because every alternative they see is worse. The heroes are the ones who refuse to accept this, then pull off a solution that saves everyone, because the person writing the story made there be a solution that saves everyone. If the Utilitarian was right, and there weren’t any other choices, then by stopping him, the heroes would be responsible for something horrible, and we can’t have that, now can we?

Of course, I can’t claim the rules work any differently for moral relativist heroes. I once read a truly vile book called The Soprano Sorceress where the protagonist murders her way onto the throne, kills thousands of civilians to stay in power, and justifies it all as being for the greater good. Apart from all the bodies she piles up, it basically works out like she planned. You can’t have your hero killing people if there was any better solution to the problem. You can’t, unless you’re Orson Scott Card and you’re writing Ender’s Game.

( Read more... )

An early short story by Orson Scott Card, Eumenides is about a selfish, manipulative man who finds a baby drowning in a toilet. It’s short and devastating, and I’d prefer not to spoil it, except to say that the ending of this story is what I think of when I think of what atonement and forgiveness really mean. Have it for free: http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/72261/20/Card_-_27_Short_Stories.html

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

The Gulf Between is a short story about a programmer who wants to make robots more like people and a spy who wants to make people more like robots. It’s aggressively 1950s in both its setting and its attitudes, but it has an unusually good grasp on how the Soviet Union functioned and the kind of world its leaders tried to create.

I mention it because its portrayal of artificial intelligence reminds me of the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky. If you’re a Yudkowsky fan, I think you’ll find it interesting to compare how ideas of the inhuman A.I. have evolved over the decades. (And if you have no idea who Yudkowsky is, I recommend reading it anyway–this approach to A.I. is surprisingly uncommon.)

I once read a book called Little Fuzzy, which was about the discovery of childlike animals that might or might not be sapient. It’s one of the few science fiction classics from before the 1970s that’s aged well, and I fully intend to write a post about it if and when I ever reread it. In the meantime, the closest thing I’ve seen to another story like Little Fuzzy is a fanfic for a webcomic I’ve never read.

( Read more... )

Claw your flesh from off your bones

Face that fire on your own

Embrace the life you thought that you would never know

( Read more... )

I picked up a lot of my thinking about identity from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

For the educationally deprived among us, the title character of Invisible Man calls himself that because people don’t see him. They can see that a person is present where he is, but they see that this person has dark skin, so they perceive a Black Man. They ascribe to this person the traits and qualities they assume all Black Men must have, and they interact with him as they would interact with any Black Man. Not all of them see the same Black Man or expect the same things from him, but they all have expectations he won’t or can’t match.

The ways in which he, and other black men, negotiate this space of invisibility are varied and sometimes self-defeating. Sometimes he plays along with other people’s expectations so he can benefit from them, while other times, he goes against his own desires just to avoid being stereotypical. People he trusts use him, betray him, or simply fail to understand what he’s trying to express, and every time he thinks he’s found a life and a purpose, it’s yanked away. In the end, the story itself is his purpose, because by telling it, he can hopefully make you understand him and see him as he is.

(It’s a side topic, but the character who fascinates me the most is Sybil, an innocent, wholesome young woman who’s completely divorced from the fact she has a libido. Bad girls want sex, and she’s not a bad girl. But her perception of a Black Man is a physically powerful rapist, so if she hangs around Black Men enough, maybe one of them will rape her and she’ll be helpless to stop him. She’s built so many walls that could easily be broken if she were willing to ask for and openly enjoy sex, but she’s not a bad person or someone who intentionally causes harm. The narrator even likes her, though he doesn’t have it in him to play along with her delusions.)

Anyway, this is why I talk so much about invisibility in the context of bigotry, and why I think the root of so many problems is the failure to understand that another person truly exists. A lot of arguments I see, on Tumblr and elsewhere, are based in the idea that *Outgroup* can be boiled down to one or two simplistic archetypes that act or think identically and should be treated identically. But people exist beyond archetypes, and if you don’t observe them on an individual level, there are a lot of things you’re never going to perceive.

“Well, you know, if you read the Bible, there’s actually a couple of circumstances where that happened. And the Lord uses all circumstances. I mean, you can get on that path, but you know it’s a reality, unfortunately … So you’re saying that God is not sovereign with every activity that happens in someone’s life and can’t use anything and everything in someone’s life, and I disagree with that.”

― George Faught, when asked if pregnancy from rape was the will of God

“You know how, when there’s a disaster or a sudden death or a plane crash or a bankruptcy, there’s always someone around who says, ‘everything happens for a reason.’ I guess it’s supposed to be comforting, although I’m not sure how much comfort can be found in that statement. ‘You mean my child didn’t just die because his cells metastasized, he died as part of some greater plan?’ …

“I’d rather have someone say to me, in a moment of sadness, ‘nothing happens for a reason,’ because I think there’s more evidence that’s true and, anyway, it makes me feel better that the universe has nothing personal against me. If I have a cut on my hand, I’d like to believe that I just have a cut on my hand. If ‘everything happens for a reason,’ that means that there is some great consciousness that has decreed that I must have a cut on my hand and you do not. Why are you special?”

― Jon Carroll

I once saw two people on the TV Tropes forums arguing over the precise nature of Heaven. Person A thought Heaven was a place of continual self-improvement. Person B thought Heaven was a place of rest and contentment. But the argument itself is immaterial. What matters is the way they argued it.

Person A’s argument was simple: rest and contentment wouldn’t be Heaven for him. He strived to improve himself in life, and he intended to continue doing so after death. In his terms, “I don’t want The Dungeon of Monsters That Are Just Strong Enough to Really Challenge You."

Person B argued that person A was being deluded by his earthly constraints. Any being freed from the shackles of mortal thought would see that an afterlife of rest is better than an afterlife of challenges. When Person A died and went to Heaven, then he, too, would understand that and accept his afterlife of rest.

I see a lot of arguments that remind me of person B, especially when religion is involved. Not so much in what’s being argued, but in the argumentative technique–the insistence that your personal preferences are objective facts, and other people’s personal preferences are objective falsehoods. Some people are better at framing and disguising this than others, but I’ve yet to see anyone change their minds because of it. It simply fails to be convincing.

I've realized that the way I think about and categorize anti-gay religious beliefs is fundamentally different from how the people who hold those beliefs categorize them.

I saw a post on Ask a Manager about an office organizing donations to the Salvation Army. The OP wasn’t comfortable with this, due to the Salvation Army’s refusal to support gay people. In the course of suggesting alternatives, a different poster said they wouldn’t be comfortable giving money to Doctors Without Borders because that organization “promotes abortion.” That turned into a derail about abortion politics, so the moderator started removing comments.

One person posted this: “Your website, of course free to moderate the comments as you see fit. But sure – abortion as a nonstarter for charities is off-limits but Christian affiliation/views are a legit concern. Word.”

This was the moderator’s reply (emphasis mine): “Why wouldn’t the topic of religiously affiliated charities at work — in the comments on a post about exactly that — be on topic? Abortion politics aren’t relevant to the question the letter writer asked. (That said, little of the conversation here is about religious affiliation; it’s about discrimination.)”

The moderator was expressing her thoughts about religion and discrimination in the same sense I would think: that the two are separate categories. How religious you are is unrelated to how anti-gay you are, and statements you make about the fact that someone is anti-gay are unrelated to statements you make about the fact that someone is religious. Someone who is not religious may be anti-gay, and someone who is religious may not be anti-gay.

The poster she responded to was thinking in the sense that being religious and discriminating against gay people are synonymous. If you don’t like that an organization discriminates against gay people, then you don’t like that this organization is religious. If you ask an organization to stop discriminating against gay people, then you are asking that organization to give up being religious.

I understand now why all those anti-gay people insist everyone else is being intolerant of their religion, and frankly, the thought scares the hell out of me.

There’s a scene in The Matrix where a character explains how to bend a spoon. The trick is to remember that you’re in a computer simulation and the spoon doesn’t actually exist. It’s just sensory input to your brain. You’re not bending the spoon so much as you’re “bending” yourself, changing your perception of how the spoon is shaped.

I’ve concluded that this is a decent enough metaphor for my thoughts on religion. I don’t hate gods, because I don’t think gods exist. But I believe that you have a conception of what your gods are like, and I believe that conception is based on your own nature and desires. Thus, when I hate your gods, I’m really just hating you.

The idea of a personal God who can take away disease and reunite you with loved ones after death is intoxicating … Jesus says, “Tell me your problems and I’ll solve them for you. And if I don’t solve them, it’s for the best. Trust me” …

Nonbelievers, imagine that there is no problem that you can’t walk away from because everything is in God’s hands. Oh, you’re unemployed? Pray about it. God is in control. He’ll either help you find a job or not – either way, He’s in control. Are you depressed? Ask God to help. Whatever you’re going through is happening for a reason. Are you sick? It’s not God’s fault, but he will get you through it. Elections aren’t going your way? That’s definitely the Devil at work, but we can pray about that because God made the Universe and has a plan.

–Kristi Harrison, 4 Specific Things You Lose When You Leave Christianity

It’s not okay, it will never be okay, and the only thing worse than it not being okay is insisting that it is …

[E]verything good I’ve ever accomplished, even from before the trauma, comes from that place. It’s Not Okay that people are being denied asylum. It’s Not Okay that mom was facing dad’s death alone. Nearly every word that I write, even on pretty frivolous stuff, comes from that place …

I don’t know how I can communicate this, but living in that headspace isn’t as depressing as you’d think. Kind of liberating, actually. In its best moments, it’s getting involved in EA stuff, realizing you can save multiple lives just with your meager salary, and know you’ve gotten is one step closer to a world where no one finds their father comatose on the couch. It’s realizing how much good there is to do, and how much of a difference it makes when you do. And for me, it’s an affirmation of the value of human life. To affirm that the root of spiritual values isn’t in a distant afterlife or tribes or groups, but the goodness of happiness and the obscenity of suffering. No one should have to go through what I went through. Or what you did.

It’s Not Okay. And together, we’re working towards a world where it never happens again.

Academicianzex, untitled post

(This is also what Marx was talking about with his “opium of the people,” but he’s way harder to understand.)

Ask a Manager:

An employee, “Sally,” started at our workplace about a year and a half ago … I heard her correct someone who referred to her boyfriend as her boyfriend/partner, saying that he wasn’t her partner, he was her master, and should be referred to using his appropriate title. She compared it to gay rights, saying that if she was a man, they wouldn’t erase her relationship by referring to “Peter” as “Patricia,” and so they shouldn’t erase the D/s relationship by calling him a partner instead of a master.

Ask a Manager’s response: it’s her own personal thing, but she has no right to drag you into it. Keep pushing back.

Also Ask a Manager:

I’m a manager who has an employee who recently (late last year) accepted a promotion that involves travel … She accepted the position knowing that this level of travel would be required.

However, she told me last week that she will no longer travel because her husband told her no and her religion tells her to obey her husband … She says it has to be accommodated because it’s her sincerely-held religion.

I also know her husband recently took away her car because “queens don’t drive.” … She can no longer attend external meetings alone because she doesn’t have transportation, which has created problems already.

Ask a Manager’s response: get a lawyer, because this is gonna be ugly.

I finally beat Persona 5. I’m still gathering my thoughts for a full post, but one thing I can say–Paranoia Agent just got one-upped. Hard.( Read more... )

That is entirely too many colons, isn’t it?

( Read more... )

The cycle of life and death has been broken. The souls of the dead vanish, and the living are born hollow and empty. Society decays without a new generation, while the survivors squabble over who or what caused this. But by chance or fate, you may have stumbled across the real culprit …

( Read more... )

When the stars align, the Rites shall come to bear

Illuminate the signs; the exiles shall be there

All are not the same, but three shall be as one

Freedom in the flame; the end has just begun

( Read more... )

A manga that’s exactly as fucked up as it wants to be. Sometimes literally.

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At the mansion known as The Sexy Brutale, time twists and turns on itself. The guests and the staff all have a role to play, and they speak the same lines and perform the same motions time and again. Each night, every guest is brutally murdered, and each day, they wake up and start all over.

You are an intrusion in their perfectly constructed world, the one person who stands outside the script. You can’t talk to them, or even be in the same room as them. But it’s up to you to help them from the shadows, and find some way to stop the events that lead to their doom.

( Read more... )

When I was a child, Greek mythology confused me. Human heroes tried to be like the gods, and they were cast down for their hubris. But gods acted like gods all the time. Why wasn’t it hubris when they did it? Thalia’s Musings is the first story I’ve read that examines that question.

( Read more... )

Edit: I haven't added entries to this page for a long time, but I think it's worth keeping stickied, just as an introduction.

Any blog should start off by introducing its subject, but in theory, Utilitarianism is quite simple. It’s a theory of ethics under which you should take whatever actions will lead to the greatest happiness for everyone involved. There are no other rules or restrictions–just make as many people as happy as you can make them.

So to make this more interesting, let’s go over some of the things Utilitarians DON’T have.( Read more... )

When I see Unordinary mentioned, people often say it’s “like Boku no Hero Academia.” I’ve been thinking about it more, and I’d say each one is the mirror universe to the other. Unordinary is a world where absolute power prevents heroes from existing, while Boku no Hero Academia is a world where absolute order stops heroes from being heroes.( Read more... )

Inspired by El Goonish Shive:

She breathes through her skin

The more magic she uses, the more her body overheats

She gets hot all the time because she’s part demon

The more of her bare skin is splattered with demon blood, the more powerful she becomes

When bad guys stare at her chest, they don’t remember what her face looks like

This outfit has more mobility than full armor

Wearing very little is a symbol of how you have so much magical protection that you don’t need to worry about anyone trying to kill you

She’s an emotional trainwreck who distracts herself with sex and booze because she expects her abuser to murder her soon

She’s a professional performer, and sex sells

Her clothing is actually a living being that coincidentally looks like that

“She dresses like a prostitute to punish men” (I have no idea what the context for this is)

This was the first outfit she could steal to replace her prison uniform

She’s been persecuted and cast out because she’s biologically intersex, and this is her way of forcefully proving to people that she’s a “real” woman

I just really wanted to draw a scantily clad woman with huge breasts. Is there a problem with that?

Harry Potter has the same energy as Coraline in taking things that really shouldn’t be normal, then treating them in such a way that children will immediately find them recognizable and normal, while adults will immediately find them horrifying. It’s just that in this case, the “monster” is child abuse. Harry is so matter-of-fact about all the shit the authority figures in his life pull, and children nod along as they remember all the horrible shit their own authority figures did.

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April 2025

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Page Summary

Where the Bad People Go
Stop! You Violated the Law!
You Might Be a Rapist. Yes, I Mean You
When a Trolley in an Arena Hits a Doctor Harvesting Organs from a Lonesome Stranger
Lee Hurst Is a Ticking Time Bomb
The Ones Who Break the Chains in Omelas
The Speluncean Explorers vs. the Sinking Boat
Robin Hood: The Economic Utilitarian
Utilitarianism: Ethics for Gamblers
The Fresh New Taste of Ethics
Ontological Importance; or, Who Is This “God” Person, Anyway?
The Cycle of Sacrifice
The Cycle of Sacrifice, part 2: The Normalization of Sacrifice
Simply Too Stupid to Live
The Ethics of Superheroes, Part 1: Superman Is a Kant
The Ethics of Superheroes, Part 2: Making an Example
The Ethics of Superheroes, Part 3: Poor Little Children
The Two Rabbis and Jesus
I Love Fluffy Bunnies
Utilitarianism and Abortion
I Am Not Rational
Evil
Otherkin, DID, and Acceptable Targets
You Almost DID It
Instant Win Conditions
Anselm’s Ontological Argument
I Do Not Care About Islam
Race, Religion, and Not Being the Bad Guy
I Fall To Pieces
Lost in Translation
The World You Need
A list of reasons why I’ll give up talking to you about your moral or political beliefs
“Should,” “Does,” and Safety
Genocide By Ignorance
I Am Thou, Thou Art Everyone
Deterrence Is Bullshit
It's Double Effective!
More Executions? Are You Positive?
I love the way the new Prey game handles morality
Fiction for Utilitarians: Assassination Classroom
Fiction for Utilitarians: Ender's Game
Fiction for Utilitarians: Eumenides In the Fourth Floor Lavatory
Schrodinger Is Dead; Long Live Schrodinger
Fiction for Less Wrong: The Gulf Between
Fiction for Utilitarians: Loophole
Fiction for Utilitarians: The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories
Fiction for Utilitarians: The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (part 2)
Fiction for Utilitarians: Invisible Man
Nothing Happens For a Reason
Your Heaven Is Your Own
Intolerant of Their Intolerance
On Hating Gods
It's Not Okay
Why Religious Exemptions Are Bullshit
What’s Wrong With Japanese Culture, According to Paranoia Agent and Persona 5
Fiction for Utilitarians: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice
Fiction for Existential Nihilists: Pillars of Eternity
Fiction for Utilitarians: Pyre
Fiction for Utilitarians: The Severing Crime Edge
Fiction for Utilitarians: The Sexy Brutale
Fiction for Utilitarians: Thalia’s Musings
An introduction to what Utilitarianism isn’t
Power, Order, and Superheroism in Unordinary and Boku no Hero Academia
A non-comprehensive list of excuses I’ve seen for why female characters dress like that
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