datanguay@watrose.UUCP (datanguay) (04/18/84)
[] [response to response to Gerald Owens] > > The value of a thing is equal to the amount of sorrow its > removal from existence will cause. > >All fine and good, But what is so special about person X if their >sorrow for another person Y's death makes Y valuable, but if nobody >values X's life, that X has no value? I.e. How can a person give >somebody else "value" (it's not intrinsic, by the above definition) >if they themselves have no value unless someone else would be sorrowful >for them, and they, in turn, would have no value unless that first >person valued them. What the heck is so special about "somebody else"? Nothing is special about somebody else. I don't care about life, only suffering. I am assuming that death causes the victim no pain. >(presumably, a person cannot give value to themselves, mainly because >they would be dead, and so obviously cannot sorrow for themselves). Yep. >Also, there is the convenient clique effect. Given a group of people who >value each other, but nobody outside the group likes anybody in the >group, it would be bad to kill ONE member of the group (the rest would >be sorrowful), but OK if you kill everyone (nobody would be sorrowful, >since the ones who would be are conveniently dead). Yep again. Incidently, this implies the entire race as a species, so I think it's okay to have a nuclear war, so long as it's all out and guaranteed to wipe out everything. [response_to ** 2 Andrew Koenig] >How does your definition relate to the thousands of homeless souls we have >wandering the streets of most major urban environments?? I submit that >their death or murder would probably cause little or no sorrow; this is >precisely why these people often end up on the street in the first place! >Are you saying that these lives have no value and should therefore not be >saved/rehabilitated? Or, worse yet, that their murder should not be >considered morally unjustifiable? They die every day and most people don't care. For an individual, if nobody knows that individual is alive (more precisely nobody cares) then their life or death is meaningless. This is similar to that well-known tree crashing ever so silently in the middle of a forest with nobody around ... This is something of an observationalistic (??) philosophy. [ response_to ** 2 P. C. Minasian ] >Are you saying that things that do not exist are valueless? >If so, why should I ever work to create something? If they truely don't exist, they have no value. If you've thought of it, it exists in an abstract way (kind of like all the "rights" people like to talk about). Why should you ever work to create something? If nobody has thought of the thing you would create, nobody would know it wasn't created (do you miss having a thortlesnod?). You might want to create something cause it makes you happy, though. I apologise if this has been a bit off topic. I'm leaving the net now for an indefinite period of time, so I won't be around to yap about this philosophy as it relates to abortion. The main point of the whole thing is that different people have different views on life (real deep, eh?). Pro-lifers share the view that human life is sacred (not necessarily in a religious way) and should be saved if at all possible. Pro-choicers are a mixed group of various outlooks. They seem to fall into to main groups: 1) The foetus is not human so it's okay to kill it (but otherwise they're pro-life) 2) Human life is not all that sacred, and some circumstances warrant death. A very large majority of people will be disappointed with any decision. It might be nice to split the planet in two and put each group on a half. (Is it okay for the Arabs to deny their women any rights? Does any group have the right to impose it's morals on another? eg. should we attempt to force the Arabs countries to give their women rights? Extend to abortion ...) I see some parallels with the current situation in Manitoba (where there's a big squabble over making the province bilingual (French-English) because 5-10% of the people speak French - actually there are more Germans there than French but the French have Quebec to back them up). The end is the means, but the means always end. David Tanguay at watrose!datanguay