RE: What would be the harm?
December 3, 2018 at 12:43 pm
(This post was last modified: December 3, 2018 at 12:53 pm by bennyboy.)
If I'm attempting to drown myself, then what value does oxygen have to me? I might see oxygen as my enemy, and wrap a rope around my neck, or fill a car with carbon monoxide, in order to prevent oxygen from doing the harm of forcing me to continue living a life to which I've attached a strong negative evaluation.
In all your examples of so-called objective evaluation, you seem to me simply to be choosing subjective evaluation which are based on stronger and stronger feelings, and which are more and more common among individuals. As much as we hate rape, most of us would dislike a total lack of oxygen that much less.
But we're still at circular reasoning-- a "correct" evaluation of the value of oxygen depends on a "properly" functioning organism, which is at least partly defined as. . . an organism which can "correctly" evaluate the value of oxygen. . . n'est ce pas?
I also find it quite convenient that we are including only people in this moral view. What about the suffering of animals? Is a moral argument, or lack thereof, which is dependent on special pleading not therefore intrinsically subjective? What is uniquely valuable about human hedonic states, that we might so easily disregard the implied objections of other animals?
In all your examples of so-called objective evaluation, you seem to me simply to be choosing subjective evaluation which are based on stronger and stronger feelings, and which are more and more common among individuals. As much as we hate rape, most of us would dislike a total lack of oxygen that much less.
But we're still at circular reasoning-- a "correct" evaluation of the value of oxygen depends on a "properly" functioning organism, which is at least partly defined as. . . an organism which can "correctly" evaluate the value of oxygen. . . n'est ce pas?
I also find it quite convenient that we are including only people in this moral view. What about the suffering of animals? Is a moral argument, or lack thereof, which is dependent on special pleading not therefore intrinsically subjective? What is uniquely valuable about human hedonic states, that we might so easily disregard the implied objections of other animals?
