Why does god want to cut off women's hands?

[John V]

Yes, absolutely. It's a more complex issue than just desires; there's a weighing of the pros and cons of those desires, their impacts on the broader group, and a host of other issues.

IOW it boils down to your opinion.

You're misunderstanding: I'm claiming happiness as one of many bases for rights.

Happiness fails, as slave owners were presumably happy with the situation but you don't recognize that as a basis for a right to slaves. So, what are these other bases?

For example, that happiness needs to be consistent and spread out;

I disagree. If I have 8 units of happiness and another guy has 2, I feel no need to give the other guy 3 of mine. If we looked at how you live and how the poorest people in the world live, we'd probably see that you're the same as me, but like to think otherwise.

it might cause an individual great happiness to see another come to harm, but we understand that an individual's right to happiness doesn't override the right of the safety of another. We know this because rights need to be applied consistently over an entire community, and allowing people to harm others for their own happiness will be overall detrimental to the cohesion of the group,

Not if it's harm to someone outside the group.

Not at all; I'm implying that there's a progressive state of improvement that can be made. Nothing will ever be perfect, but there are certain choices that can be made, even far reaching ones, that are objectively good or bad; abolishing slavery for one, since that was directly curtailing the freedoms, in a number of harmful ways, of people just like you or I.

Again, you haven't shown that it's objectively better for happiness to be equalized.

Well, okay: the presence of death and killing does not preclude the idea that, generally speaking, life is the preferred option.

Abortion opponents might disagree. So would a lot of other species.

Life is preferable to death in that life is the single objectively confirmable existence that we have, and being so we should preserve it. Pain is not preferable because it's a sense perception specifically designed to warn us about potential bodily damage, and bodily damage is bad. These are simple concepts.

These are simplistic concepts. Life good. Pain bad. NSS. If I was in excruciating pain and you could take half of that pain, you wouldn't.

Yes, but part of the evolutionary advantage that allowed humans to become the dominant species on the planet is our ability to cooperate, our natural altruism and empathy toward one another- within limits, of course- that allows us to accomplish more.

There's been slavery for all or most of our recorded history, but it's our empathy that puts us above the other species? I think not. More likely things like, oh, opposable thumbs, language, and intelligence.

Your mistake is in assuming that one can only belong to one group. There's two: there's your community group, and there's the larger human group that we all belong to.

Your mistake is to delude yourself into thinking humanity counts as a group. As noted above, you pay lip service to it, but you don't act as if it's true.

And I have to ask, if this idea of outsiders being fair game is a compelling one to you, would you be okay with slavery in your country, so long as those slaves where foreign? If not, why not?

I'd like to see prisoners put to work, so you could say I support community slavery of our own citizens.

I don't know. I'd like to think I would, but I honestly couldn't say. You are dodging my question, though.

You too!