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

[Esquilax]

IOW it boils down to your opinion.

Well, until you can demonstrate that your omnipotent deity exists, opinion is really all we have. And it's not just my opinion; if it was, it wouldn't have any real world effects. These decisions are reached through mutual agreement.

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?

You seem to be just sloughing off whole portions of my argument whenever it's convenient. Did I not say that happiness is a single element of a larger series of considerations?

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.

The mistake here is that you're considering happiness as a finite resource, when what it is is a subjective emotional state. Oh, and also that you're, once again, ignoring large parts of my entire position in order to focus on smaller issues where you might actually gain some traction.

I wasn't using the phrase "spread around" in some totally egalitarian sense, but rather in the sense that the pursuit of individual happiness can be suspended if it overly affects the overall happiness of the community. I suspect if you'd read the entire passage, rather than stopping at the part you quoted and considering the rest as a separate item, you might have realized that.

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

We're all a part of the human group.

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

It's objectively better in that groups that have rules that they all agree to follow have less chance of coming to ruin. That's why you see groups that are actively slanted toward single entities maximizing their happiness at the cost of others falling apart as often as they do; North Korea certainly seems like a great place to be, huh?

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

Really? The people that call themselves "pro-life" would disagree that life is a preferred state to death?

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, I know that they're simple. Do you read my whole post before you start to reply? I've said that they're simple myself; they're the starting point of building a moral system, not the entirety of one.

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.

Did you not read the "part of" section at the beginning of that first sentence?

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.

Your inability to consider the entire context of my position doesn't make me wrong.

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

Equivocation: the difference between slaves and prisoners is that prisoners are released at a certain point. Slaves are not, or at least there's no requirement that they are; even your biblical seven year slavery contains rules by which a temporary slave can be kept forever.

You too!

No, my answer is that I don't know. Giving a concrete yes or no when I don't know would be dishonest.