Mass shooting, Texas, 26 dead

[DoomYoshi]

And you should believe in Gandalf:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/out-of-the-shire-life-beyond-tolkien/

[patches70]

I ask DY a question.

Could you sum up "life" is that each individual does things for one of two reasons; to avoid pain or gain pleasure?

It seems these two things are at the very base for virtually everything we do. For instance, a person smokes because it brings him pleasure. The moment the pain of smoking overcomes the pleasure of smoking the person will find the "will" to quit, finally.

Some of the things we do we do with the expectation of pleasure later. We work our jobs to get things, some of us might view the job as painful, but what we think we will get in return (more stuff, money which should attract women/men etc etc).
We'll certainly lie to to gain pleasure, as in lying to gain sexual partners and money.
We'll definitely lie to avoid pain. That's often the justification we use for lying.

One of the biggest problems is that people in general have no idea what is going to bring them pleasure. We all think we know, but most times when we get said things that we thought would bring us pleasure/happiness, turns out to be a double edged sword that eventually causes one enough pain to finally say "enough is enough". We've all had that crazy girlfriend/boyfriend that we thought made us happy until we realized that the person was a crazy nutbag that we finally had to cut loose because the pain of dealing with that person finally overshadowed the pleasure we thought we were deriving.

We often aren't rational in our pleasures and our pains either. Virtually every pleasure is subjective. Most pains are also subjective, save for physical pain. A vast majority of people would say getting their arm cut off would be a pain they'd do just about anything to avoid.

This model seems to apply even to armed forces, soldiers, who convince themselves that they are getting something that should be classified as "pleasure" by serving. Most wouldn't say that word, more like "honor" or "privilege" but the same principle. It gives them pride which in turn feels pleasurable.

You have any thoughts on this DY?


I find your worldview quite fascinating TBH. In this model your serial killers kill not because they are doing a service for the world, but rather simply because it brings them pleasure. They obviously don't want to get caught because that would entail some degree of pain that they'd rather not experience.
For other killers who get caught or rather confess, do so because the guilt caused by their actions brings such pain that they'd confess and spend their lives in prison or go to the electric chair just to avoid that painful guilt. Not all pain is physical, after all.

The hardest choices we make are the ones where either path brings pain no matter what we do. In those cases everyone, and I mean everyone, will take the path they think will cause the lesser degree of pain.
The alternate is also true, when faced with two choice with each bringing pleasure, or what we think will bring pleasure, everyone, and I mean everyone, will choose the path they think will bring the greatest pleasure.


I suppose the ultimate trick is to figure out what will actually bring pleasure, i.e. make you happy. Society can't tell you what those things are, and people who think society is going to tell you what you should think is pleasure/happiness is are in for a rude awakening.

But I'm just wondering what you think about the pleasure/pain being the only real motivation people base all their decisions on throughout life.

[notyou2]

DY, if you are seeking enlightenment, try taking LSD

[mrswdk]

I read the other day that reading information that supports the views you already hold leads to a release of endorphins (i.e. it is physically pleasurable). I guess that means that it is morally good to only read news sources that support your world view.

[DoomYoshi]

@Patches, the only problem with a pure pleasure/pain analysis is that people a priori value their life, regardless of any real or perceived pain or pleasure. Even people who have terrible lives want to keep living (except in extreme cases). If you could with certainty calculate how much life you had to give up to maximize pleasure through your life, many people would still trade the maximum overall pleasure for some lesser amount of pleasure that resulted in a longer life.

Specifically, if there was an equation that summed up all sources of pleasure over your life, but some of those sources of pleasure (eating meat, doing drugs, etc.) shortened the overall span yet added to total pleasure over the life; people would still ignore it. I mean if n is all the pleasure of your entire life added up, and x is length of life, maximum n isn't the goal for most people but rather maximum x. Of course there is no such equation, which is why people make irrational choices as a rule.

You may appreciate this article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-root-of-all-cruelty

particularly this line:

Some evolutionary psychologists and economists explain assault, rape, and murder as rational actions, benefitting the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s genes.

Since I was trained as an evolutionary biologist, this is where I get these ideas about sex and violence. They aren't really my ideas but actually in the scientific literature.

I read the other day that reading information that supports the views you already hold leads to a release of endorphins (i.e. it is physically pleasurable). I guess that means that it is morally good to only read news sources that support your world view.

[Dukasaur]

The arguments have become too convoluted, so I'll start from the top.

There are two realities. One is the "is" reality. This is the objective reality of science. The other is the "ought" reality. This is the subjective reality of laws, governments, tribes and happiness. To pretend that you rely only on objective science and then actually use subjective science is a lie, plain and simple.

Science can't make value statements. Period. It can tell you if something is, but not if something ought. Science can never answer the question "is this good?". How can you prove that happiness is good? Misery loves company, so maybe misery is good.

No disagreement there. Science answers descriptive questions, not normative ones. This is elemental.

Nonetheless, scientific knowledge provides the background which allows normative questions to be answered as something more than guesswork.

Aristotle was one of the most brilliant thinkers of all time, but he got many things wrong, because the background didn't exist. Brilliant or not, his view of the universe was no more than guesswork. We ought to be able to do better.

You've made a choice to be irrational -- it's not necessary to turn your back on reality and science and immerse yourself in fairy tales. Yes, we are all burdened with our reptilian brains, but these help our bodies get through, and enable our higher brain functions to work.

I haven't turned my back on science. I rely fully on all the observable evidence. That is how I was able to build a systematic philosophy from the ground up. Unless you do likewise you don't even have a reptilian brain but rather the brain of a lobster.

Keep your insults. I have built a systematic philosophy. You've heard it many times if you had bothered to listen.

A systematic philosophy starts with understanding how the world works, and understanding how the world works starts with thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics teaches us that entropy always increases. The implications is that nothing beautiful is permanent. All things disintegrate, rust, burn, crumble, and rot. All things die. Furthermore, on the road to dying they must kill others. The constant loss of energy means that all organisms must kill other organisms in order to replenish their energy. This isn't only true of those of us that eat other organisms. Even photosynthesizers fight to crowd out other photosynthesizers to find space in which to snag a few more rays from the sun.

Now, if there is a God, this is the way he intended it. There's no particular reason why it should be so. A universe based on decreasing entropy is just as easy to postulate as a universe based on increasing entropy. If there is a God, and if he is all-powerful, then he could have created a universe of decreasing entropy, but he chose.....CHOSE .... otherwise.

For the rest, I'll express things as if God exists, although I find it exceedingly unlikely. So, for the rest of this, just to spare me typing out the disclaimer in every paragraph, consider this a blanket disclaimer.

He could easily have given us a universe where beautiful things, once created, persist forever. He CHOSE to give us a universe where all beautiful things rot and crumble and rust.

He could easily have given us a universe where animals can grow simply by capturing random tidal forces. He CHOSE to give us a universe where animals must murder other animals to steal their energy to keep themselves alive for a little bit longer.

With a single flip of the entropy switch, all the things that we call evil -- murder, rape, theft, deception -- would be unnecessary. We could have a universe of limitless plenty and harmony instead of limitless shortage and strife. So, regardless of what spin the priests put on it, we suffer and die, we lie and steal and kill each other, because He chose to make it so.

Virtually alll of the universe is death. This little skin on this little tiny planet is thus far all the life we know for sure exists. We reassure ourselves that there must be other planets with life on them, but so far we don't even know that with any certainty. But even if there is, it's still a tiny fraction of the universe as a whole. Even if every planet in the universe has a biosphere, that still leaves 99.999% of the universe that's death and chaos.

Until thermodynamics was a science, it was easy for people to delude themselves into thinking God was good. It's no coincidence that the science of thermodynamics and the Enlightenment were born around the same time. The Enlightenment thinkers may not have fully articulated it, but you can see the realization dawning that "Hey, the universe is designed to maximize pain and suffering. This God asshole is out to kill us."

Now, I am a living thing. It seems completely sensible for me to be on the side of living things. You're right, it's a normative decision. I can't prove through science that I should be on the side of living things. But the alternative makes no sense to me whatsoever.

As a living thing, I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other living things. Essentially, we're all in this together. We owe it to each other to make it as painless as possible. Yes, the designer of the universe has designed it so that suffering and death are inevitable, but we can reduce the suffering, we can reduce the death. We can't turn it off, but we can ameliorate it to a degree.

To me, the highest virtue is Kindness. In short, to be as nice as is possible within the constraints the wicked world allows.

I cannot live without killing other things and eating them. Fine. God has made it so, there's nothing I can do about it. But I can choose to do it humanely. In my life I have killed many things. I am a carnivore. But I have never tortured an animal or inflicted death in anything but the swiftest method available. We are like gladiators in a pit. We know that we won't be able to get out of here without killing each other, but we can choose to make it swift and painless. It pleases God to watch us suffer and die. We can't stop the dying, but we can reduce the suffering.

You may sneer all you like and say that

There are two observable principles in human life - sex and violence. Closely related to these two is enforcing your will upon others

Maybe so, but you still have choices. You may not be able to avoid violence, but you can look for options that minimize the violence. You can choose to be nice, even to your enemies. (Ironically enough, that's something your Christians preach but rarely practise.)

Sex may be unavoidable, but you can choose not to be a brutish about it. You can make a choice to be gentle and nice about it.

It IS possible to be nice. Saying that sex and violence are unavoidable and therefore it's okay to rape and pillage is a pure bullshit cop-out.

Until your worldview can adequately explain these three things, it is a faulty worldview. You can try to sweep murder under the rug as much as you like

I don't try to sweep it under the rug. I know that God has created an evil universe of perpetual scarcity where all things live in fear of imminent death. Desperate to protect themselves, they lash out at perceived threats, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. It's really not difficult to explain. I don't expect everyone to control their fear. All I can do is ask that they try.

The call is to go forth and show the glory of God in your works

This is an outright lie. The core design of the universe proves that God favours destruction, not creation. Those who build great works are doing the work of the Living, though they may fool themselves into thinking that it's for the glory of what they mistakenly perceive God to be.

The Living build cathedrals. God makes them crumble. The Living paint The Last Supper. God makes it fade and crack. Whenever men think they are doing things for the glory of God, He comes and shits on them to prove what he really thinks. And still the poor deluded fools do it again....

God afflicts them with cancer and arthritis and cystic fibrosis. Doctors --secular humanist doctors -- seek for a cure.

The language gives us great clues for what people really think, even when they're afraid to admit it. Great cataclysms are knows as Acts of God. You can't point to anything good and call it an Act of God. Men, thinking living men, will build a pretty village in the hills, fill its larders with wine and cheese, fill its streets with laughing children. God throws at them a volcano, turns the village to ash, watches the children's skin burn away.

Build great works, yes. But build them for the glory of the Living. Not for the Architect of Death and Destruction.

[Thorthoth]

So far, Duk seems to be winning this text-building race...
but I'm not going to play until somebody moves this thread to 'Forum Games'.

[DoomYoshi]

So entropy was known for a long time before it was known in science, at least in principle. Hebrews 1:10-12 (a quote from Psalm 102:25-27): In the beginning, Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will roll them up like a robe; like a garment they will be changed. But you remain the same, and your years will never end."

Either way, once again that is the point. You can view the world in a "me vs the universe" approach and start arbitrarily handing out what you deem as kindness whenever you see fit, all the while pretending you are happy. Or you can "lay your burdens at my feet" "take up your cross and follow me" and actually be happy. The kindest thing you can do is explain the gospel to someone.

Volcanoes are beautiful, mountains are beautiful, space is beautiful. That's kind of my point. The world would be so much more beautiful if humans weren't on it. All you do is ugly up the scenery. Yet it's not for me to question God.

You envision a universe where entropy decreases over time. That isn't easy to envision at all. The ancient Greek philosophers "knew" that only the heavenly beings could be perfect. From a modern perspective, the probability of the world having increasing entropy is 1 (since it actually does). So how do you envision a world with increasing entropy? I mean it's possible to conceive of what the effects of one might be, just like it's possible to envision how 2-d people might live but it's impossible to envision how it would come about.

@patches: I thought of another point that shows an interesting interplay between pleasure and morality. Kim Jong Un is universally decried as evil, yet most men given the chance would probably body swap with him. This shows that the greatest pleasure is in exploiting fellow humans. It's not the sex per se, it's the forced sex. It's not the money per se, it's the theft. Yet most people are too timid to actually exploit people (although exploitation is built into the American system now, most people don't think about it). Rather than explaining why they are failures, people refuse to see themselves as failures and "moralize" away their deficiencies. This shows that despite all evidence to the contrary, people are still capable of pleasure and treat almost equate life with pleasure.

[mrswdk]

Volcanoes are beautiful, mountains are beautiful, space is beautiful. That's kind of my point. The world would be so much more beautiful if humans weren't on it. All you do is ugly up the scenery. Yet it's not for me to question God.

Isn't beauty subjective? Natural landscapes can be cool but my favorite landscapes are crumbling human-made ones, primarily those from the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Think old Victorian factories, crumbling 1930s ballrooms in downtown Detroit, footage from inside the wreck of the Titanic, that sort of thing. Even with impressive natural scenery I always think adding something industrial improves the view. Some of my favorite views ever were things I saw in the countryside in northern China: great expanses of plains with random apartment blocks in the middle of nowhere, mountains and valleys with a mile-long coal train passing through them, that sort of thing.

Also, do you remember the boss N Tropy from Crash Bandicoot? He had a big tuning fork that he used to attack you with shock waves. I was just wondering what the meaning of the word 'entropy' is that lends itself to being that bad guy's name. Thanks in advance. mrswdk.

[DoomYoshi]

Volcanoes are beautiful, mountains are beautiful, space is beautiful. That's kind of my point. The world would be so much more beautiful if humans weren't on it. All you do is ugly up the scenery. Yet it's not for me to question God.

Isn't beauty subjective? Natural landscapes can be cool but my favorite landscapes are crumbling human-made ones, primarily those from the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Think old Victorian factories, crumbling 1930s ballrooms in downtown Detroit, footage from inside the wreck of the Titanic, that sort of thing. Even with impressive natural scenery I always think adding something industrial improves the view. Some of my favorite views ever were things I saw in the countryside in northern China: great expanses of plains with random apartment blocks in the middle of nowhere, mountains and valleys with a mile-long coal train passing through them, that sort of thing.

Also, do you remember the boss N Tropy from Crash Bandicoot? He had a big tuning fork that he used to attack you with shock waves. I was just wondering what the meaning of the word 'entropy' is that lends itself to being that bad guy's name. Thanks in advance. mrswdk.

Beauty is subjective. That is why I was so able to so easily counter his arguments on beauty and why you are so easily able to counter mine.

Entropy is terrible. It means something that people have always known. Every person will die, every kingdom will collapse, every name will be forgotten. To declare that entropy=God and therefore God is the enemy which humans must band together and fight is a non sequitor though.

[DoomYoshi]

Here's an interesting article on a woman I hadn't heard of - Philippa Phoot:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-philippa-foot-set-her-mind-against-prevailing-moral-philosophy

Quite against her mother’s wishes, she worked for a year with an Oxford entrance coach (then, as now, big business) and enrolled herself in a correspondence course in Latin, intending to apply to Somerville College, Oxford. A 19th-century foundation for women’s education, Somerville had a reputation for high academic standards. When she was admitted to study PPE (philosophy, politics and economics), her mother worried for her prospects. A friend comforted her: ‘At least she doesn’t look clever.’

She arrived at Somerville in that momentous year 1939, her clothes conspicuously more impressive than the homemade wartime chic the other women in her year were sporting. She made the acquaintance of Murdoch, Anscombe, and Mary Scrutton (later Midgley). Between the one-on-one or small-group tutorials she received in the traditional Oxford way, and the intense conversations with her peers, she received a philosophical education of great concentration and eccentricity.

The men – both dons and undergraduates – were, for the most part, away. As the women educated in those years later found, this made for an atmosphere of discussion quite unlike the one both before and after the war. With the young men away, there was no one to sustain the compulsive ‘argy-bargy’ – to use the term popular in the 1930s – of the inter-war decades. As Midgley put it in a letter to The Guardian in 2013:

[I]n those wartime classes – which were small – men (conscientious objectors etc) were present as well as women but they weren’t keen on arguing. It was clear that we were all more interested in understanding this deeply puzzling world than in putting each other down.

Foot was sent for tutorials in philosophy to a young man called Donald MacKinnon. Even by Oxford’s demanding standards, MacKinnon was an odd man. He would lie on the floor and beat the walls, brandishing a poker and attacking the fireplace. He was given to painfully long, reflective silences, when it was simply unclear if he could hear what was said to him. But once his terrified students discovered that neither he nor they would come to any serious harm, they would find themselves in the middle of the most exhilarating conversations they had ever had.

Conversations with MacKinnon were wide-ranging, open-ended and intense. There was no attempt to shut up anyone by declaring their claims nonsensical or meaningless. The philosophers of the late 1930s, still reeling from the publication of A J ‘Freddie’ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936), had been much given to that sort of thing. Among dozens of other brash claims, Ayer’s classic book – which brought the radical ideas of a circle of intellectuals in 1930s Vienna back home to Britain – had declared that all ethical discourse, being unverifiable, could not strictly speaking be true or false. In expressing a moral judgment, one was really ‘evincing’ one’s emotions or attitudes, no more and no less.

Oddly enough, Ayer saw himself as rescuing the claims of ethics from the dustbin to which he thought a yet earlier academic had inadvertently consigned it. In the early years of the 20th century, the Cambridge philosopher G E Moore thought that he had shown something of great interest about the nature of morality with an argument of devastating simplicity: that the ‘good’, so central to all morality, cannot be the name of a natural property. It can’t, for instance, be another name for pleasure – as he took some Victorian ‘utilitarian’ philosophers to be saying. Surely it is possible to ask of something: ‘Yes, this is conductive to pleasure, but is it good?’ The question feels ‘open’, not yet settled – and that, he thought, could reveal something interesting and deep. If there is such a thing as goodness, it is not to be found in nature, and therefore, not to be investigated by those who make it their business to study nature, ie scientists and their philosophical apprentices.

Most philosophers agreed that there was something to Moore’s idea, but not everyone took it to have the same conclusions. For the Austrian philosophers from whom Ayer got his best ideas, the notion of properties ‘outside nature’ was exactly the kind of unscientific nonsense from which they hoped to rescue their canny, sceptical generation.

Wrong and right, bad and good were all slightly misleading ways of saying – in effect –‘Boo!’ and ‘Hurrah!’. Religion and aesthetics went more or less the same way, all dismissed as worse than false.

-------

A few years later, the full extent of the Holocaust came to be known. Could someone looking at photographs of the death camps at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau continue to maintain that ethical judgments were ultimately not the sort of thing to be true or false? If some judgments couldn’t be true and other ones false, what was there to be said about, if not to, the Adolf Eichmanns of this world? That he had his attitudes (‘Hurrah genocide!’) and we had ours (‘Boo!’)? Combine that with the further view that there is nothing to make one set of attitudes any better than any other, and one had a position that Foot thought ‘had to be bad philosophy’.

The Viennese positivists’ dismissal of ethical and religious discourse as unverifiable, and therefore merely expressive, was an exciting novelty when the enemy was the ancien régime of clergymen and courtiers. The war changed everything. What had seemed tough-minded and revolutionary now seemed merely complacent. As Murdoch informally put it in a documentary interview in 1972, it betrayed the smug assumption that:

[W]hatever anybody’s likely to think about morals is going to be more or less okay. I mean, one might say it’s a sort of pre-Hitler view. It’s a view which goes with our sort of 19th-century optimism and a feeling of progress and a feeling that people are fundamentally decent chaps, a view which after recent history […] one cannot in general take.

What would a moral philosophy look like if it started from a darker picture of human beings as not, basically, ‘decent chaps’? Part of what animated Foot and her allies was a conviction that the answer to such a question would not be easy or self-contained, would not be the sort of logical proof one could polish off in a few weeks, if one were only clever enough. When they returned to Oxford to take up fellowships at its colleges, their influence was not immediately felt. The clever young men were back from the war, inclined to patronise their female colleagues, and carry on where they had left off.

Temperamentally unsympathetic both to religious solutions and to mystical ones, Foot looked for considerations that even Hare might recognise. In the beginning, her chosen line of attack focused on unsettling the sharp distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘value’ that she found in Hare and other philosophers of the age. Where, she asked, did this leave such a concept as rudeness? By anyone’s standards, to pronounce some behaviour as rude is to make a value judgment. But there are objective criteria for counting some behaviour as rude (rather than, say, polite or cowardly). We don’t get to choose.

She took the point further: perhaps the reason we cannot freely choose which facts are relevant to whether some action is rude (or cowardly or polite or treacherous or whatever) is that these concepts are related in some way to human good or harm. That, and not some point of logic, is what marks them out as moral evaluations. Only a few years after Hare and Sartre thought that they had buried these old-fashioned ideas for good, Foot was trying to bring essence back.

Like other philosophers before and since, Foot’s achievement consisted in pointing us in a better direction. Instead of looking to logic or language for answers, she suggested that we look to ‘the reality that surrounds man’. Human nature is a complex thing, and understanding it will take all the resources of the sciences – natural and social – as well as history. But the significance of those enquiries will lie ultimately in what they can say about the kinds of lives that might be good for us. And to know that, we must ask: who are we? What do we need – for ourselves, and from each other? And what must we be like to get it?

Foot’s point, from the start, was that we cannot simply choose answers to these questions. There is something to get right here, and everything at stake.

[Symmetry]

And yet taking meaningful action against gun violence is still the the most effective, proven method of reducing murders.

[DoomYoshi]

And yet taking meaningful action against gun violence is still the the most effective, proven method of reducing murders.

Like shooting the perpetrator with your own gun.

Here's another article I found suggesting the difficulty in ascribing value to other's lives from a rationalist perspective:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/what-basis-human-equality

[Symmetry]

And yet taking meaningful action against gun violence is still the the most effective, proven method of reducing murders.

Like shooting the perpetrator with your own gun.

How often has that happened in the mass-shootings of late?

[DoomYoshi]

And yet taking meaningful action against gun violence is still the the most effective, proven method of reducing murders.

Like shooting the perpetrator with your own gun.

How often has that happened in the mass-shootings of late?

Not enough.

"The only question is, how do we arm the other 11?"

[Symmetry]

And yet taking meaningful action against gun violence is still the the most effective, proven method of reducing murders.

Like shooting the perpetrator with your own gun.

How often has that happened in the mass-shootings of late?

Not enough.

"The only question is, how do we arm the other 11?"

A culture that says that the only answer to a gun is more guns will see more and more gun killings.

[mrswdk]

I swear if Symmetry makes one more post undermining the bedrock of Western civilisation I’m going to go to his house and smash all his Legos.

[DoomYoshi]

Some dick-weasel read this thread and then wrote a better version of it:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-evolutionary-biology-makes-everyone-an-existentialist

[Dukasaur]

Some dick-weasel read this thread and then wrote a better version of it:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-evolutionary-biology-makes-everyone-an-existentialist

The same unexamined faith that David Hume was the last word on the subject.

Not knocking the importance of his work, but Hume was writing in a time when Physics was still in its infancy. He saw the universe as a neutral force, which was a reasonable assumption with the knowlege of the time.

Now that we have a much more detailed understanding of how things work, a naturally-extracted ethics is entirely possible. Now that we know that the universe is not neutral, but actively trying to kill us, we can construct a complete ethics based on the war of Life vs. Non-Life, or Good vs. Evil if you prefer, or as I most often think of it, Enthalpy vs. Entropy.

[DoomYoshi]

Some dick-weasel read this thread and then wrote a better version of it:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-evolutionary-biology-makes-everyone-an-existentialist

The same unexamined faith that David Hume was the last word on the subject.

Not knocking the importance of his work, but Hume was writing in a time when Physics was still in its infancy. He saw the universe as a neutral force, which was a reasonable assumption with the knowlege of the time.

Now that we have a much more detailed understanding of how things work, a naturally-extracted ethics is entirely possible. Now that we know that the universe is not neutral, but actively trying to kill us, we can construct a complete ethics based on the war of Life vs. Non-Life, or Good vs. Evil if you prefer, or as I most often think of it, Enthalpy vs. Entropy.

That makes about as much sense as "now that we know gravity is trying to keep us down, we can actively fight it and build an ethics about going up all the time". Life vs. non-life still doesn't answer some very basic questions. Sometimes taking the life of other things allows your own life to continue. Sometimes those other things are people.

You say David Hume isn't the last word. Have you ever tried to get the last word in on a Scotsman?

[DoomYoshi]

Atheism is morality. As an atheist, at every action I have to think "Will this make my life better? Will this be beneficial to my people? Will this better the lives of other living things?" And of course, I constantly have to balance one against another. This benefits me but not my tribe, this benefits my tribe but not my family, this benefits my family but not the biosphere as a whole. I balance these things, and I have to live with the consequences. At all times I am concerned with the fate of living things.

I remember this quote led me to consider a silly example of "I'm sorry, I had to cheat on you, to save the dolphins." It was kind of silly, so I never included it.

Then, reality went and one-upped me by a millionfold:
https://news.yahoo.com/delhi-rapist-mur ... 52861.html

Filed through his lawyer, the now 31-year-old said in his review petition to the Supreme Court that the air quality in New Delhi was like a "gas chamber" and its water "full of poison".

"Everyone is aware of what is happening in Delhi-NCR (national capital region) with regard to air and water. Life is going to be short, then why death penalty?" the petition added.

It's not rape because of pollution.