Being a sinner just for being born

[The Grand Nudger]

1) In the context of evaluating the humanity, the rationality, the goodness/evil of mercilessly killing people? Yes, those are some of the principal metrics, and I imagine there are even more in the fullest picture.

One imagines so, yes.  

I've lost the point of your objection. Are you suggesting that my framework can't accurately identify merciless killing as bad human behavior, or are you still trying to argue that my framework leads to the conclusion that merciless killing is a good human action?

It very easily can be framed as such, even with your new weaseling of terms.  But who cares...that probably has more to do with how full the fullest picture is, eh?  I think it's far more interesting how, and what, we make edge cases out of.  Merciless killing obviously wasn't on your mind before.  

2) There's a ridiculous example =). Why must the killing be merciless in order to benefit the community? You might as well suppose that the merciless slaughter of a square circle is beneficial to the community.

The killing of mosquitoes is -already- merciless, as is a great amount of the killing we do.  The example is something altogether more thorough, though.  Extermination.  The extermination of mosquitoes, by the metrics offered before, would be beneficial to human communities.  Lives would be saved.  Even the fans of the mosquito don't quibble over that point.  This seems like a shoe-in for a moral good as you've described them...and yet it's ridiculous?  Why?

3) Not enough information. Does it add to human fullness in other ways? Does it limit or subtract from human fullness in other ways? What are the effects on the ecosystem and the life within it? How do those changes affect our communities? And many more questions that I don't care to investigate about an imaginary and poor particular case for a framework we don't even agree about in so far as its internal principles and the manner in which it provides for conclusions.

Does it -have- to add to fullness in other ways than say..reducing disease pressure of which it is a primary vector and from which a great many suffer and more than just a few die?  The case isn't imaginary, you realize?  Neither the death, the suffering, nor our potential to wipe them out.  As far as the ecology angle (and that came out of nowhere)...it's widely held that mosquitoes are, truly, useless.  The only tangible objection to our various plans (we have more than one) are ethical ones along the lines of a playing god, as it were.  Deciding the earth could do without this or that........

Great. Do you think, insofar as I am a human like you are a human, that I am a merciless killer? If the answer is yes, then I can understand your objection. If the answer is no, then I can't understand your objection to be anything more than sophistry. Help me!

I think that a framework for determing the moral good ought to be able to handle a little sophistry.....but even so, yes - I do think that you're as much a merciless killer as any other human being, myself included.  So much so that you don't seem to realize it, or have consciously trivialized it so as to make perfectly understandable exemptions.  We're not known for being uniformly friendly, as a species. That's not how we got to where we are or how we've maintained our position.

1) Ah yes, all of us fail at living our full humanity sometimes, that much is true.

all of us fail as colossally as merciless killers do. Some of us fail in bigger or smaller ways. But do all of us mercilessly kill people? I don't think so. But if we can legitimately call things failures, then that must be because we fell short of some way-of-being human. If that is not the case, then there is no such thing as failure (what standard or goal or measure are we "failing" to reach or attain?). 

You're the man with the scheme and the sliding scale..you tell me?   Seems to me that someone we'd call a merciless killer must be pretty damned successful at what he does.  

So no... failing colossally at adding to human fullness does not add to human fullness... are you just messing with me?

Think of me as a mirror. 

"Ultimately, every individual MUST be the one to determine what they think will bring them fulfillment, and then determine the most fulfilling ways to seek it out. No one does that in a vacuum." - ME HERE


It can't be a "fulfilling way" to if it is a failed-way.

-and now it's personal success over death and suffering, communities and victims?  A guy can't get it right for getting it wrong.  Certainly can't take your word for anything either.    

No. (Assuming in this hypothetical scenario that being-a-christian adds to human fullness) Your failure, if it is a moral one, is a moral failure. Even if the community derives some benefit from your failure, it is still missing out on what your failure didn't provide: your own growth in human fullness. Your failure is still a failure.

Convenient, that being a christian has something to do with human fullness.  Seems pointless to assume as much when you initially fielded this business to avoid a moral imperative brought about by the desires and peculiarities of the christian god.  I think you offered up a platitude in place of justification or explanation.  Our subsequent conversation has done nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.  You live in a world where the christian moral framework is affixed, just-so, to a "proper" moral framework by whatever metrics, however inconsistently applied.  An outsiders perspective, however, can differ greatly.  I see nothing that might add to the fullness of what we are by stringing up the better man, or worshiping the administrator who made it all possible.

You tell me..from the communities and victims angle, is the world a better place or a shittier one for having one less scapegoater in it? Is it possible that I have succeeded - on that angle, that I have expressed human fullness in this objection? Here again we see an edge case, where consistent application of -any- of your offered metrics would leave me holding a moral imperative which would get me into some really hot shit with your god. So again I ask..how do we decide when things like this come up?