RogueAI

I would say that once we're sure (or reasonably sure) something has a mind, we should assume it continues to be a minded thing until we're sure it's m...

Most likely. Minds are a necessary but not sufficient condition for having moral value. Bugs might have some kind of primitive minds, but probably not...

I prefer person, rather than human being, which is vague. A brain-dead child is not a person anymore. It's a hunk of meat being kept alive by machines...

Yes, this is why parents can order life support removed from brain-dead children and have their organs harvested.

Mrs. Smith is a bunch of cells and a mind. Any minded organism trumps any mindless organism, like a zygote.

:100:

Moral theories have to handle real world situations, like Trolley Car. If a moral theory says we should not sacrifice bugs or zygotes to save people, ...

Suppose you believed in moral theory X. Moral theory X entails that, in a trolley car situation, one must never sacrifice an ant (or any insect) to sa...

No, we've shown with examples that the life of a zygote pales in comparison to the life of a person. For example, if an orphanage and fertility clinic...

:100:

:100:

:100:

Correct.

OK, your position is absurd.

But you would pour zygotes on a burning building to put out the fire and save a child trapped inside, correct?

Exactly. The morality of killing something depends on its level of sophistication.

Women who have miscarriages can suffer extreme emotional stress. Some may kill themselves. Also, miscarriage itself can cause death. Your scenario mud...

OK, construct a trolley-car type scenario (or any scenario really) where you refuse to sacrifice zygotes to save actual persons.

:100:

So you would let a child die rather than save their life by sacrificing/using zygote(s)? I think your position is absurd. I also don't think you would...

Yeah, Bob is wrong. https://www.npr.org/sections/2022-live-primary-election-race-results/2022/08/02/1115317596/kansas-voters-abortion-legal-reject-con...

If you could save one child by pouring billions of zygotes on a burning building to put the fire out, again, do you really have to think about what to...

:up:

If you had to choose between saving a fertility clinic where a million (or a billion or a trillion) zygotes are stored or saving an orphanage where a ...

If we could build a working brain our of inorganic parts that was functionally equivalent to a working organic brain, wouldn't the non-biological brai...

Should the parents be allowed to authorize the doctors to remove life support?

What if my leg gets amputated and kept alive in a nutrient bath? Am I now less of a person? Is my leg a separate "I"?

What about the case of the brain-dead child being kept alive by machines? Do parents have the right to pull the plug and authorize the doctors to harv...

It's not a person. That's the salient point. All things being equal, it would be nice to allow it to develop into a person, but all things aren't equa...

As an idealist, I sympathize with your claim the universe might not "exist", and therefore, doesn't have to have a cause (I may be summarizing your cl...

How would that work with a braindead child being kept alive on life support after a car accident? Do the parents have any say in removing life support...

This is highly speculative. We don't know if a multiverse exists, how many universes it contains, or what kinds of universes they are. https://bigthin...

Ukraine has been able to invade Russia and hold a chunk of its territory indefinitely. If NATO forces entered the fray, Russian forces would be rolled...

:up:

Maybe not an object, but the universe certainly exists, so what caused it to exist? The only way around that I can see is to say it's eternal.

Nothing caused the the universe to come into existence? How does that work?

If a child is brain dead and being kept alive on life support, the parents can decide to harvest the organs and remove life support. This society puts...

Everything is a footnote to Plato. Just say that.

Assuming that all forms of strategic bombing involve deaths of innocents, do you think it's always immoral? For example, suppose a well placed bomb in...

Good points!

Let's suppose aliens come down and tell us that we're all going to wiped out unless we give the aliens any death row convict. If we do that, we'll all...

What if we raise the stakes to ridiculous levels where the fate of the world rests on running over the guy on the tracks?

Dark forest doesn't work because you can't hide the biosignatures your planet has been giving off for the last billion years.

At the Shanksville Fire Station, @POTUS spoke about the country's bipartisan unity after 9/11 and said we needed to get back to that'. Bates added: 'A...

There are always dangers in this universe. Wandering black holes, gamma ray bursts, solar flares, and of course, a possible nearby alien civilization ...

My posts are predicated on the aliens you were talking about earlier: aliens who can communicate by fermions and neutrinos. If you're talking about al...

I think any space-faring species will be somewhat curious, and any species that has climbed on top of the evolutionary ladder is going to be somewhat ...

If they can communicate by fermion or neutrino, it would be trivial to send probes to nearby planets with biosignatures and keep an eye on them.

They would still know of radio and remember their own days of listening to the skies with radio telescopes. It wouldn't take much to beam powerful rad...

If you had to choose to pay out reparations to one of these two groups, who would you prioritize, black men or white women?