Cito di Pense wrote:Scott H wrote:If the concepts of pleasure and pain can be adequately based on feeling and sensory experience, and
if they can be defined in such a way that a law of nature creates pleasure from another's pain, then we are truly in danger of something horrible and despicable.
... then we are truly in danger from a
definition.
I'll revise my statement: if pleasure and pain
as they are normally understood to us can be defined in such a way that a law of nature creates pleasure from another's pain, then we are in danger of something horrible and despicable.
Calling the winning argument a "fallacy" is an example of this.
To simply call the arguments I call fallacious 'winning arguments' is itself an instance of the Bare Assertion Fallacy -- and no, it's not a winning argument.
This is why, at the end of the day, a Smith & Wesson beats four aces.
What did I say about the herd of fools?
Incoherent arguments can hoodwink lots of people. This explains the success of religion. We don't need another one. Sensory experience cannot be defined in such a way that a law of nature creates pleasure from another's pain, except by using facile definitions of "pleasure" and "pain". There's a whole "self-help" movement based around that one. It's another form of religion.
Again, I appreciate your willingness to help me confront sadism. But this isn't simply a matter of redefining the words 'pleasure' and 'pain' to fit the worldview of counterbalancing pleasure. This is a matter of the universe (if I may anthropomorphize a little without assuming a deity)
lamenting someone's suffering and, as a last resort, granting the
sadist himself a sort of compensatory happiness to make up for the suffering of the victim. Add to this the conception of 'eternal recurrence as only oneself' and in the snap of our fingers we have eternal misery, the sort of misery that might compel shootings as that in Virginia Tech.
If we want to protect ourselves from utility monsters, kingdoms of suffering, and even Christianity itself with its obnoxious and juvenile conception of 'Heaven' and 'Hell,' then we must do what is in our power to refute this worldview.
Comte de St.-Germain wrote:I don't see many people defending slave morality here. Except you, that is.
I'm certainly not defending slave morality in the form
Nietzsche put it. Nietzsche seems to have this idea that those in the 'beautiful caste' who act in cruelty are incapable of doing otherwise.
Well, that's what this thread is for! I lay down an argument for sadism that appears to contain a few weaknesses, and I then ask, "What are we going to do with this?" If you don't want to participate in this discussion, you don't have to.
That, my dear, is a strawman [...]
Of whose claim?
We're talking about
sadism here, in the common understanding of the term, not the writings of Marquis de Sade. You don't have to read a book about rabbits to know what a rabbit is.
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