posted
That's funny. In college, at the 8-people-hanging-around-after-the-partiers-have-left-finishing-off-the-keg portion of the evening, I had lots of people convinced they could "cure" my Catholicism by pointing out a few superficially contradictory aspects of my faith. In these circles, Catholics were one step above fundamentalists on the interfereing prude scale.
I took it as an opportunity to witness, simply by explaining why their objections weren't what they thought they were. At least one of them later converted to Christianity.
posted
Tres: Okay. I understand that viewpoint and agree with it. As long as they're just opinions, getting angry is not generally a reasonable reaction.
And we agree that actions can be harmful to a person's freedom of choice.
posted
My opinion: Some people have no tact and get a "high" from telling other people what to do. What their opinions are varies from person to person, but in my opinion, this sort of character trait is just wrong, fosters bad feelings on both sides, and can even ruin hope for future rational discussion. Most people here have been hurt by such people in their lives and as a result are very hesitant to share their mind on sensitive topics. This makes me very sad.
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But what part of this character trait is the problem? After all, what you've described is remarkably close to the character of any leader, or preacher, or mentor. All get a high from advising others on what to do, and yet I don't think you could say most of these people only foster bad feelings.
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quote: But what part of this character trait is the problem? After all, what you've described is remarkably close to the character of any leader, or preacher, or mentor. All get a high from advising others on what to do, and yet I don't think you could say most of these people only foster bad feelings.
Let me break this down so I can explain better what I mean. I used the phrase "get a high form telling people what to do" and you said "get a high from advising others on what to do". There is a subtle difference there. Small differences can be *so* important. I get a high from advising others on what to do. But if I get a high from telling people what to do, I think I have stepped over the line.
I think we also must talk differently to different people. If we have the same moral code, I can talk to them about what they are doing being wrong. If we have a different moral code, I can't. I can just tell them that I believe what they are doing is wrong. If they are hurting someone, I would get much more insistant.
Perhaps some feel that any extra-marital sex is hurting someone? I might argue that in some cases that is true, but I think in other cases the harm (if there is any) is only to the consentual individuals involved. When abortion is involved, I think the harm is greater, but I still do not have the authority to "tell someone what to do".
I believe that agency is sacred and that people must be allowed to decide for themselves. If I pressure them, I am trying to remove that agency. It may be a futile effort, but I am still trying to remove it.
These rules change slightly in a parent-child relationship depending on the age and dependancy of the child. It is also different when laws and law enforcement is involved.
posted
At which point it becomes an issue of unsolicited advice - which is why typically people will ask before offering advice or making observations that could seem a bit personal and potentially offensive.
posted
If the difference between my being helpful and my being harmful is whether or not you want my advice, then the difference would depend on you rather than me, and thus it would be once against be unfair to be mad at me. After all, what if you wanted that advice? Or what if you don't want it now, but will realize you do want it sometime after you hear it?
Truthfully, I don't think that IS the difference. I think it's a difference in why I am giving the advice. If I am giving it to help you, I think I am in the right. But if I am giving it to make myself look good, I think I am treating you poorly.
The trouble with that difference is, how can you figure out what my motives are for giving you advice? You can only guess....
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quote: If I am giving it to help you, I think I am in the right. But if I am giving it to make myself look good, I think I am treating you poorly.
Bingo!
How can you tell the motives? Well, sometimes you can tell and sometimes you can't. Sometimes people say they are doing it out of love--*believe* they are doing it out of love--and yet they are not. I say you try to give them the benefit of the doubt.
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posted
Kat, while it is true that you can never really know what someone's motivations are, it can be fairly clear if they are being offensive.
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posted
dabbler, I meant that when you recreated Person A's opinion, it was always negative and inflammatory - casting Person A as the bad guy.
beverly: What would make it clear? In a discussion of issues about which people have different opinions, especially when emotions run high, it can be VERY hard to tell what is offensive, short of personal insults.
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And if I feel the need to make a point, I may be a bit more sarcastic or abrasive if I think it would help to better convey the message. Depending, of course, on how important I feel the message to be.
Of course, the person could just be a rude prat with the best of intentions. Or just a rude prat.
posted
If I could interject something off-topic for just a sec...I'm kind of new here, could someone define the meaning of the term "dobie" in this community for me? And while we're at it, "landmark"? I have a rough idea what they mean, but I'd like to know for sure.
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posted
I agree that offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder. That is why the following statement was phrased with multiple modifiers.
quote: it can be fairly clear if they are being offensive.
Porter comes from a family that is very good about choosing not to get offended. I have appreciated his and their influence in my life!!
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posted
Dobie: A thread that mimicks another. Often the titles are very similar and there is a related link. Or not.
Landmark: A tradition started by Papa Moose. The tradition is that when you reach 1000 posts (or not) you share something more of yourself with the community. What you share or how is up to you. Whether you repeat this at other large round numbers is also up to you.
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I think that it is very rare that a message is conveyed more effectively because of harshness/rudeness. Most of the time, I think that it cripples its effectiveness
A dobie is a thread that is made only as a play off of another thread title. For example, we recently had a thread titled "I dont mean to be rude, but", so somebody dobied it with "I don't mean to be a prude, but". Some say that to be a ture dobie you must include a link in the initial post.
A landmark is a thread that you usually create on a landmark number of posts -- usually on multiples of 1000 posts. Often times people use landmark threads as an opportunity to share something about their lives, but you can really do whatever you want. Landmark threads are archived so that they don't geet deleted.
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posted
dobie: Once upon a time, there was a poster named Dobie. Dobie created threads where the title was a close match or a pun on an existing thread, and there was usually a link in the first post.
Example:
Original: Idiots are ruining it for everyone Dobie: Idiots are running for everything (with a link to an election web site.)
Dobie himself was banned after creating a dobie of the I Have the 1000th Post thread. The dobie was intended to be I Have 1000 Posts, and he clicked Submit approximately a thousand times for the first reply, attempting to post 1000 times simultaneously. This screwed up the programming and brought down the board. Dobie did come back, but lay low for a while and now posts under a different name.
Some dobies are better than others. Some people consider all dobies to be lame, and every once in a while an original title will prove to be catnip for this crowd and 15 or so dobies of the same thread will appear in an hour or so. These are times of great sorrow.
Landmark: Papa Moose wrote out some of his life story for his 1000th post. This became a tradition, and at post milestones people will often write out something personal to them - often a life story. This is a way to get to know people better and way for people to talk about things people may not ever know. Some people have problems with the landmark tradition, seeing it as a plea for attention or seeing it abused, but I think it's worked out well.
posted
Katharina, but I pointed out that that's the exact opinion as portrayed by people posting in these threads. And I asked if you wanted to rewrite the opinion to exemplify what you wanted.
And instead of doing that you just tell me that it was offensive?
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This is the Landmark Thread Archive. You can't add posts to any of the threads once they get archived, but they are available for viewing.
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posted
That's what I mean. The person comes off as the bad guy, and the defense is that they are a bad guy. That could be fairly offensive if someone chose to take it that way.
Okay, rewrite: Having sex outside of marriage results in harm to the people involved, even when there is no occurrence of unwanted pregnancy or STDs.
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posted
Kat - that was a great explanation of the dobie -- I didn't know the full history. I'm assuming Dobie's little problem with the 1000 post thing is also why the board's program now makes us wait a few seconds before posting back-to-back posts?
posted
I think it is fairly common for someone to misinterpret friendly comments as an attack. In fact, I'd say that happens more often than actual attacks.
Another similar problem is that people giving unsolicited advice often take the dismissal of their opinion as an attack. I think for many of these religious fanatics, this is the case. They are so used to people looking down on their extremism that they assume a "you are an idiot" is implied in every "I don't need your advice."
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posted
beverly, got a question for you. (Though anyone else should feel free to answer too.) How similar in moral codes do you really think people in the same religion are? Because I think in reality, the amount of variance of people's moral codes that are in the same religion varies as widely in nuance (though superfically appearing the same) as those that aren't.
AJ (And yes, I mean even among the "truly devout" ones, i.e. while you might find a few more similarities in the "married in the temple LDS" I still think you'd find very divergent opinions especially if you looked on the global level of the LDS church.)
posted
Wow, thanks for all the answers I had the landmark concept pretty well figured out already, but had no idea of the history behind the dobie; I thought it was more of a kicking-the-anthill type deal where somebody would post something deliberately inflammatory, then sit back and watch all the howling and frothing at the mouth. (Keep in mind, the only thread I recall seeing specifically called a dobie was the "premarital sex is stupid" one, so I don't think it was an unreasonable inference.) You guys have some pretty neat customs/traditions here.
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quote: beverly, got a question for you. (Though anyone else should feel free to answer too.) How similar in moral codes do you really think people in the same religion are? Because I think in reality, the amount of variance of people's moral codes that are in the same religion varies as widely in nuance (though superfically appearing the same) as those that aren't.
Well, more different than they ought to be. I think this is true for many groups of organized religions. If you look at the doctrine, the people should be fairly united in their personal moral codes. But such is often not the case. I chalk it up to human individuality and sometimes to human fault. We all have to find our own way, and sometimes our differences are due to honest differences in paradigm, other times we are actually rationalizing in order to do what we want to do.
I don't know if they vary as much or not. Part of belonging to a religion is usually believing in certain common tenets of belief which quite often include scripture. Usually the differences have to do with differences in interpretation.
posted
I grew up in a fairly large city, I'm not sure of the demographics of this site, but there were 1400 students at my high school the year i graduated. The majority of my high school was sexually active. I've been with three girls, one 14, one 15, and one 18. Now, those ages might be surprising to you, but how's this one: The 14yr old lost her virginity at 12 years old. She regrets it of course, but most adults do not realise the pressure that is put on young people to be as good as thier friends. Telling them about the dangers doesn't really change thier attitudes about it. Young people are going to do what ever they want to. In my state a law was recently passed requiring someone be 18 to purchase condoms. Does this really prevent younger people from having sex? No.
Young people need to know how to find, get, and use adequate protection. And this knowledge needs to come earlier than many adults want to realise.
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quote:Unless you are willing to accept that there is no reason why killing a given person is wrong (and hence that we could just as well allow all killing)...
Well, there are some issues of practicality, as well as morality, as I mentioned. But here's a question : Do you accept killing in war? For if you do, then you have presumably drawn a line saying "In these circumstances killing is OK, in these it is not." And even though I agree with that line, I can't see where it is not arbitrary. So your 'Y' is not as absurd as all that.
quote:Incidentally, if you want to know what I believe, I'd argue a person is someone who experiences existence. A nonperson does not.
Well, that's a pretty sensible definition, but it seems to me that a chimpanzee or dolphin have at least a dim grasp of their own existence, while a one-month embryo most certainly does not. Again, experiencing existence isn't a binary set such that you can conveniently assign every object to one side or the other.
quote:Firstly, saying someone is human because they fit a pattern is different from saying some is arbitrarily called a human. Fitting a pattern is, in fact, a nonarbitrary characteristic.
I must disagree, for there can be degrees of goodness-of-fit. You could probably even come up with a number for it, if you had a sufficiently clever scientist. Then you'd have to draw a line : At what degree of goodness-of-fit do we accept the object as human? Which places us right back at square one.
A crude example : A part of the pattern, clearly, would be 'walks on two legs, has two arms.' Chimpanzees manage that much, at least occasionally. Of course, they are really terrible fits in other respects, but they are a much better fit than an elephant. In a dark room, or at a distance, you could mistake a chimp for human; you would never do that with an elephant.
(And conversely, people with no legs fit the pattern so well in other respects that they are still accepted as human).
quote:Secondly, all you are talking about here is how we decide whether we think someone is a human. That is not the issue. The issue is who actually IS a human.
You have suggested that it is impossible for what we believe about X's personhood to be false - that it is impossible to be wrong about who is a human. (...)
I am saying that there is no other standard to measure humanity against, that we can actually use. There may exist a Platonic Ideal Human that we could compare against; but we'll never know about it, and the concept is therefore not useful. (See my comments on Platonic morality in the 'I never thought about it this way' thread).
quote:Or consider the possibility that someone met you and decided you are not human. Would that make you not human?
I have to say, I consider the possibility rather remote. Please note, I'm not talking about a conscious choice, here, in the sense of "I want his stuff, so I'm going to consider him as non-human for convenience." That just doesn't apply when you meet a human post-partum; the response is hardwired deep in our brains by evolution, and conscious thought is just a thin overlay.
As for your robot : If it could indeed fool me into thinking it human, then I'd have to seriously consider giving it the privileges accorded to humans. Why should I apply a different standard to machines? That's what the Turing test is all about.
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posted
Nope. It's in response to a post by Xaposert about midway up the previous page. This thread has grown fast since yesterday.
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quote:Do you accept killing in war? For if you do, then you have presumably drawn a line saying "In these circumstances killing is OK, in these it is not." And even though I agree with that line, I can't see where it is not arbitrary.
I'd accept killing in a war only because it would likely avoid even more killing (or some other evil). Why is that arbitrary?
Besdies, if you're going to claim that morality is arbitrary (which is essentially where this would head) then the entire discussion is a moot point - the answer to whether or not it is okay to have sex any time you want would have to be arbitrary too.
quote:Well, that's a pretty sensible definition, but it seems to me that a chimpanzee or dolphin have at least a dim grasp of their own existence, while a one-month embryo most certainly does not. Again, experiencing existence isn't a binary set such that you can conveniently assign every object to one side or the other.
I don't think it's possible to kind of experience existence. I certainly have never done it. I can write a simple computer program that can report it exists - that's no proof of personhood.
Note: I said experience experience, not grasp that you exist.
And as for chimps and embryos, I don't see how we can know whether they experience existence of not. We've never been a chimp, for one thing. I have been an embryo, although I cannot remember it, so it's hard to say whether or not I experienced anything when I was an embryo. But, I experience now, so that must have began sometime, and the embryo stage is as good a guess as any.
quote:I am saying that there is no other standard to measure humanity against, that we can actually use. There may exist a Platonic Ideal Human that we could compare against; but we'll never know about it, and the concept is therefore not useful.
What does it matter if we can use it? My point (which you disputed) was that we could be mistaken about whether or not a fetus is a human. As long as any standard exists distinguishing the two, it means we could be mistaken, regardless of whether we could ever know what that standard is or use that standard.
And again, at the very least there is one difference between the two: We can't (in normal circumstances) kill a person, but we can (in those same circumstances) kill non-persons.
quote:I have to say, I consider the possibility rather remote. Please note, I'm not talking about a conscious choice, here, in the sense of "I want his stuff, so I'm going to consider him as non-human for convenience." That just doesn't apply when you meet a human post-partum; the response is hardwired deep in our brains by evolution, and conscious thought is just a thin overlay.
Remote but still possibile. So, if that situation were to arise where someone thought you were not human, no matter how remote the possibility, would you agree that you cease being a person? Or would you concede that you can, in fact, be mistaken about whether a given X is a person or not?
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posted
I would then have to conclude that the other, apparent human's human-detection circuits were faulty. Therefore, he would be a danger not just to me but to society, and I would be fully justified in killing him. Please note, I'd never find out about his decision that I was non-human until he tried to treat me as such, presumably by killing me.
When it comes to experiencing existence, how do you know another human experiences it? The usual reasoning is by analogy : If I prick myself with a needle, it hurts and I go 'ouch.' If I prick someone else with a needle, they go 'ouch.' I conclude that they feel the same. That reasoning applies equally well to a chimpanzee. And to embryos after, say, three months. (I'm just picking an arbitrary number here, it could be six months for all I know. The point is : Not at conception.)
quote:What does it matter if we can use it? My point (which you disputed) was that we could be mistaken about whether or not a fetus is a human. As long as any standard exists distinguishing the two, it means we could be mistaken, regardless of whether we could ever know what that standard is or use that standard.
What on Earth is the use of a code of morality that by definition cannot be applied? But I think we may have to agree to disagree on this one, because I feel we are on the very verge of starting to argue the semantics of "what is a mistake" and "what is a standard."
To put it another way : We have stumbled on another version of the tree falling in the forest with no-one around. You say "Yes, it does make a sound." I say "Who cares?" Beyond that point, the discussion becomes fairly useless, I think.
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quote:I would then have to conclude that the other, apparent human's human-detection circuits were faulty.
And isn't that just a slightly more complicated way of saying he was mistaken about your humanity?
quote:When it comes to experiencing existence, how do you know another human experiences it?
I don't. I'm just assuming it really, based on the idea that things similar to me will be like me. I could be wrong there too.
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quote: I would then have to conclude that the other, apparent human's human-detection circuits were faulty. Therefore, he would be a danger not just to me but to society, and I would be fully justified in killing him. Please note, I'd never find out about his decision that I was non-human until he tried to treat me as such, presumably by killing me.
During the Age of Exploration there was a perfectly legitimate debate on what exactly a human was. Some of this, to be sure, was fueled by the desire to take people's land, but not all. On the one hand, there were arguments (wrong, but not inherently specious) that Native Americans, Africans, and so forth, might not be human. On the other, there was legitimate question whether the great apes were human--in particular, orangutans, who were regarded as human by the Malays.
Today we regard these questions as settled--it's rightly considered racist even to raise them. But at some point they did have to be honestly asked: what exactly constitutes humanity, and do these apparent humans fit that model? It's not so natural as one might expect. Some people, like you and me, are willing to believe that an apparently human robot is a person. I know a lot of people who will not concede that. There are also people who can't be convinced that simple responsive programs aren't conscious.
Times come now and then when we need to have our model of "humanity" expanded. I estimate as many as 90% of the times that the opportunity arose, doing so was the right thing to do. (Though it appears that we were right not to include the orangs.) That's one of the reasons I'm so suspicious of the pro-choice group--they seem very quick to dismiss any suggestion that their model might be too restrictive.
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