A troll or a sock? Please. It's ridiculous to have to argue in favour of this proposition : It is bad to get tortured to death.

That doesn't require an argument in the first place. That's absurd and scary.

What if you like being tortured?

laklak wrote:This is the end of this post.

This is the first and last sentence of this sentence.

Master Lawbringer wrote:A troll or a sock? Please. It's ridiculous to have to argue in favour of this proposition : It is bad to get tortured to death.

That doesn't require an argument in the first place. That's absurd and scary.

Then what is the purpose of your opening post? Are you so presumptive as to think you are in a position to lecture us on this subject? Do you honestly think none of us have ever considered your profound exposition before you rolled up here? Do you actually think you have made some profound discovery that automatically earns you some sort of status?

Your response doesn’t convince me that you are not a troll, or sock, or both.

How is dying from torture any different than dying from prolonged illness? Is it more bad to suffer for months or minutes? Maybe another set of Amen’s will enlighten us.

RS

theropod_V_2.0 wrote:
Do you honestly think none of us have ever considered your profound exposition before you rolled up here?

Yes, you'll only hear those ideas coming from me.

theropod_V_2.0 wrote:
How is dying from torture any different than dying from prolonged illness?

Your society in a nutshell and why I'm so concerned.

Ok, so troll it is.

RS

Master Lawbringer wrote:It is very reasonable to consider being placed inside a brazen bull and cooked alive as bad. That's not opinion based, that's non-negotiable. If you doubt that ... are you zombies?

If it's not an opinion is it a fact?

If we can't even agree that considering getting tortured to death a bad thing is self-evident then the rest of my argument will be lost on you as well.

I think the problem is equivocation on the word "bad".

Dying of slow dehydration while trapped in a cave is "bad", but it is not morally "bad". Being the person not in the torture device is "good" but it is not morally "good".

Different systems of describing morality place the "goodness" and "badness" on different things - although typically on conscious actions taken by agents rather than mere situations or circumstances. The portion of the OP that I read seemed utterly oblivious to this crucial distinction, despite its seeming obviousness.

Master Lawbringer wrote:



End of Document.

No sooner has one left, another one turns up.

It has recently been established that pasting bits from the Wikipedia into a post is not an auspicious foundation to base one's argument on. It certainly is no safeguard when it comes to non sequiturs, as this one duly demonstrates:

Master Lawbringer wrote:The person inside of the bull is considered the victim, hence 'good'.

Being roasted alive by a tyrant certainly makes you a victim, but no process is known that turns a victim into something good. Speaking for myself only, should Donald Trump find himself in the unfortunate position of being executed in the above manner (a fate I don't wish on anybody), I would not for a picosecond consider him 'good' on account of having become the victim of another tyrant's tender mercies.

The author of this particular non sequitur makes matters worse by not even owning up to creating it. He passes responsibility off to "most people" instead.

End of

Master Lawbringer wrote:If we can't even agree that considering getting tortured to death a bad thing is self-evident then the rest of my argument will be lost on you as well.

Sigh.

Don’t straw man my comments. Point out where I wrote that being tortured to death isn’t bad. You won’t because I didn’t. What I’ve contended from the beginning of this wank fest is that there are all kinds of bad ways to die. Some of those ways would be far worse, or more bad, than being cooked in a brass bull. Of course you can never admit this because your singular myopia prohibits even the remote possibility that one could think differently than you, and if someone does they are automatically wrong. This seems lost on you, and rather than climb down out of your ivory tower you assign a false stance to my position based on your blindness to any view other than your own.

Now, what kind of snake are we talking about? A non venomous rat eater, or a pissed of mother cobra? Do you actually mean the “Great Serpent”, but don’t have the intellectual honesty to just make your true position apparent?

I just think your trolling, and not doing a very good job of it.

RS

I'd go with a rinkhals. Just look at this fucker.

I’ve been up close and personal with a big fer-de-lance, in the wild, and as far as aggression goes I’d put one up against any cobra ever. I made no movement at all and the big bitch came right after me anyway. I broke cover and put considerable distance between us very quickly, or more commonly known as running away. It was the first, last and only one I ever want to encounter. Of course I’ve never seen a cobra in such a setting, and my opinion just might change if that were to happen. Thankfully my days of sneaking around in a steaming jungle are far far behind me.

RS

Rinkhals aren't particularly aggressive, and aren't true cobras. They're gorgeous, though. They're spitters as well as biters, and like to play dead, lying on their back with their mouths open. The ones to really worry about are the puff adders, though. They tend to freeze in place rather than run and are so well camouflaged you can easily step on them. They're incredibly fast strikers despite their rather chunky appearance. Very nasty cytotoxic venom, and lots of it, if it doesn't kill you a bite often ends in amputation due to tissue necrosis. Responsible for the majority of deaths in Africa. If you're hiking in the bush you need to keep a sharp eye out.

Master Lawbringer wrote:It is very reasonable to consider being placed inside a brazen bull and cooked alive as bad. That's not opinion based, that's non-negotiable. If you doubt that ... are you zombies?

Sorry, but you seem to think that everyone is troubled in the vocabulary department.

The word 'bad' in the context supposedly concerned with morality is not the same as 'feels bad' - I already pointed this out: do you plan to address it, or were you hoping to somehow continue to smuggle it into the conversation?

Master Lawbringer wrote:A troll or a sock? Please. It's ridiculous to have to argue in favour of this proposition : It is bad to get tortured to death.

That doesn't require an argument in the first place. That's absurd and scary.

Actually, it's the lack of clarity in your argument that's resulting in your confusion.

You are, as I've explained, equivocating between two distinct definitions of the word 'bad'.

It is bad to get tortured to death.

There is only one nominal subject in there as seen by your usage of the passive, so the 'bad' element there presumably means 'it feels bad' - it's got no moral component contained therein.

Is it morally bad to torture someone to death: yes.
Is it morally bad to be tortured to death: absent qualification, no.
Does it feel bad to torture someone to death: for most people yes, but I guess for your hypothetical psychopath, no.
Does it feel bad to be tortured to death: yes.

morally bad =/= feel bad.

If you can resolve this, you might make some headway.

Master Lawbringer wrote:

theropod_V_2.0 wrote:
Do you honestly think none of us have ever considered your profound exposition before you rolled up here?

Yes, you'll only hear those ideas coming from me.

Um no.

Master Lawbringer wrote:

theropod_V_2.0 wrote:
How is dying from torture any different than dying from prolonged illness?

Your society in a nutshell and why I'm so concerned.

Which society is this supposed to be, and where exactly have you expressed any substantiated concern?

Something else to discuss might be the significant weight that the OP puts on egalitarianism, which is simply: the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities, and how this does not appear to coincide with how the OP uses the term when it says things like: "Egalitarians do not completely consider the person inside of the brazen bull the fortunate one, but it does seem to be going in that direction".

An egalitarian view of a torturer and a torture victim is simple: Both torturer and torture victim have certain rights to be treated equally, things like the right to bodily integrity, freedom from being tortured, freedom from inhumane treatment, freedom from harm, freedom from humiliation. Both torturer and torture victim must be considered symmetrically, without prejudice - either both have such rights or neither do. The torturer makes moral violations of these rights. The torture victim does not.

This actual view of egalitarian ethics stands in sharp relief from its portrayal in the OP.

In the same spirit as the OP, it could be argued that legal systems have the overall effect of making people less happy, because most laws tell people not to do things they would otherwise enjoy doing. Legal systems also mandate punishment of lawbreakers, thereby reducing the level of happiness still further.

Of course, this is not the case, because, as most people understand, the laws enable more effective cooperation, such that the happiness created by the cooperation comfortably outweighs the reduced happiness involved in following the laws and punishing the occasional malefactor.

In particular, the majority of individuals take their own happiness to be increased by general compliance with the local legal system. If enough people think the local laws aren't having that effect, there's apt to be social unrest or revolution.

All this takes high intelligence and probably a measure of genuine altruism towards kin to reduce the likelihood of individual selfishness causing a breakdown. Morality's almost certainly an evolved feature of human social behaviour, legal systems are the formal manifestation in large groups where people don't know each other.

Spearthrower wrote:

Master Lawbringer wrote:
Your society in a nutshell and why I'm so concerned.

Which society is this supposed to be, and where exactly have you expressed any substantiated concern?

concern troll much?