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

[Esquilax]

Even so, opinion would be all we have. I’ve already told you I don’t believe in objective morality.

Well, okay.

Criminals generally don’t agree with their sentence. The poor don’t agree to be poor. These decisions are reached by agreement of some people. Same with slavery – some people agreed to have it.

Criminals broke a pre-agreed upon code of ethics; their objections to their punishment don't factor into it. They broke the law, the deterrent must be carried out if it's to have any weight. You might have a point with the poor if we were talking about a communist state, but we're not, generally speaking; accumulation of wealth falls under one's freedom to succeed or not at their own will, though I'd point out that we do recognize the inherent disparity of the social lottery, and redress it with certain government programs, somewhat.

All of this is moot, however, because as I've said before, majority vote is not the only criteria by which these decisions are reached.

I’m trying to break a rambling, shifting mess into pieces that can be analyzed. If you don’t like it, lay out your entire argument, once, in an organized fashion.

Hey, I'm sorry, this is a complex issue that you seem intent on not understanding. And I have laid it all out there; your continued attempts to cut it into smaller pieces without dealing with the whole is what's causing any confusion here.

Part of these determinations are external stimuli; we know what we like, and what hurts us, and it's objectively good to avoid the latter while allowing the former within reason. Part of these determinations are down to empathy and altruism; we do good and try to be equitable because there's an understanding that those memes are helpful to our species, since we can accomplish more by cooperating. Part is down to a weighing up of costs and benefits, as one would expect from a rational society.

There are other considerations, but I don't want to be writing a book, here. We can start with very simple basics, and build up a more complex system from those. It's just demonstrable fact; we've learned as we've gone, we've created a system that is, at the very least, much improved from days past.

Incidentally, how do you think these things are determined? After all, if you're arguing you must believe in some other way, no? It's hard to address you without knowing your position.

Another shift. You previously tried to tie happiness to pain in an attempt to establish some amount of objectivity.

Only in the sense that we uniformly like one and dislike the other. The purpose of the pain stimuli, after all, is as an unpleasant warning that something bad is happening.

Actually I agree with this last position. I know people with chronic pain that are happier than some people in good health, and I know some poor people who are happier than those better off. It kills your argument against slavery based on happiness, though. Paul agreed with this, noting that he was content in the lord regardless of his circumstances. He also advised slaves in general to abide in their current position, but to be happy nonetheless. This is possible because, as you note, happiness is a subjective emotional state.

Yes, and consenting to be a slave is something different; of course you can be happy in a situation you've chosen to be happy in. My concern is with those that have not chosen to be slaves, who would like to be something else but can't; recent history is rife with examples of this. If one wishes to be happy as a slave then fine, but the caveat I would want on this process is that if that happiness changes, then that person is free to leave; the issue with slavery is the robbery of free choice, in that it amounts to kidnapping. It wouldn't, for example, extend to slavery in the BDSM sense: it's the force that I object to. That's what most people object to; free labor given with consent isn't illegal, after all.

And again, happiness isn't the sole consideration.

Yes, you’re using weasel words to avoid real analysis of your positions.

You say analysis, I say strawman. The fact that large swathes of my positions are conspicuously absent lends credence to the latter label.

The fact that we still have slavery, and slavery was officially prohibited only recently, says otherwise.

Again, this is called learning.

So you agree that prisoners with life sentences are slaves owned by all of us.

No, because prisoners of any stripe aren't property, and there are conditions and basic rights in place that they have in common with any other person.

Yes, by volunteering. Are you saying people shouldn’t have the freedom to do that?

I'm saying that giving them a wife to coerce them into volunteering isn't much of a choice.

You have no problem asserting that long-dead slaves were unhappy when you don’t really know.

Some of them might have been happy, but I doubt all of them were. Given those rules on how to beat them, I'd suggest that many weren't fans.

Look, could I seriously get a position on these things from you so that an actual discussion can take place? I'm getting kind of tired of having to take shots in the dark as to where you're coming from, here.