4 ms·
I can, without hesitation, proclaim that eating children is categorically wrong.
by asif 18y ago
I can, without hesitation, proclaim that eating children is categorically wrong.
- PStamatiou 18y agoin our culture. in others not..
- ph0rque 18y agoand our species... I eat (potential) baby chickens for breakfast almost every day.
- sant0sk1 18y agoThere are some absolutes in the world which cannot be bypassed by cultural mores. Eating a child is wrong regardless of how one would justify it.
- lehmannro 18y agoHow come you think that? I cannot see any biological advantage of not eating your children in emergency situations -- i.e. where you need to eat the child (survival, extortion, ...) and she won't survive anyways.
- asif 18y agoBy that logic, you could justify absolutely anything.
- lehmannro 18y agoDepending on your standards, you can justify absolutely anything. There is nothing that is inherently right or wrong -- perhaps something that is right or wrong in most views. Our standards have changed, too -- not even a century ago, holocausts were considered absolutely appropriate (even by scientists!).
- sant0sk1 18y agoNo. Despite your opinions, and your best efforts to redefine good and evil, there are things which are inherently wrong. Murder is one of those things. All humans know murder is wrong, whether they admit it or not.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- donw 18y agoRight, so the Samurai, who would randomly cut the heads off of people they didn't fancy, knew they were doing something wrong, and yet were totally okay with it? Beheading a few peasants was, after all, the right way to test out a new sword... there's even a term in Japanese for it: Tameshi-giri. Plenty of societies, both ancient and modern, have legalized, or even encouraged, what we define as 'murder'. And note that I'm not arguing that murder is acceptable; rather, that the definition for it changes so much between societies as to make the statement "Murder is wrong in all human societies." a completely meaningless phrase. A likely explanation for the prohibition against the killing of other humans is strictly pragmatic: Societies where members can kill each other freely will self-destruct. This has nothing to do with 'murder being wrong', as much as free homicide not being a very stable evolutionary path.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- ars 18y agoNo, there are no absolutes. Lets break it down. Is killing children always wrong? In many countries it's legal (today) to kill children. In some cultures surplus children were left to die of exposure (Sparta for example). And once the child is dead - well some cultures eat the dead as a form of burial. There goes your absolute. Just so you know: it's not possible to create a moral system from first principles. It always has to be imposed from outside. In most countries the bible serves as the starting point. If you want, you can have one guy decide, and use his ideas. But you can never defend them as absolute and correct. Another person, just as logical, can come up with conflicting ideas, and you can never prove one is right and the other wrong.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- Eliezer 18y agoName me a human culture that eats babies. Also you've committed the classic error of confusing "Culture X thinks Y isn't wrong" and "Y isn't wrong". Is it true in some societies that the Sun goes around the Earth?
- jauco 18y agoYou're confusing ethically wrong (as in 'considered to be not nice') with scientifically wrong (as in 'considered to be not consistent with observations')
- ntoshev 18y agoI don't know why the parent gets downmodded, he is right. What is considered morally right and wrong is culture specific, it is not absolute. For example, some cultures used to sacrifice children to their gods. We may consider this wrong, but they certainly didn't.
- jimbokun 18y agoWe're right.
- ntoshev 18y agoYour original statement would apply to itself if it didn't have the word "almost".
- asif 18y agoHa. Thanks for pointing that out. Perhaps I instinctively avoid blanket generalizations so as to avoid the criticism that I am currently unleashing on this article.
- cosmo7 18y ago> I can, without hesitation, proclaim that eating children is categorically wrong. You are captain of a cruise liner full of children. The ship is boarded by pirates. These pirates are utterly evil and utterly truthful. They demand that either you eat one child, who happens to be about to die of a congenital heart defect, or they will blow up the ship and kill hundreds of children. What do you do?
- rokhayakebe 18y agoDude, you have a wild imagination.
- asif 18y agoI'm not sure what I would do, but I know what Jack Bauer would do. He would eat the pirates.
- khafra 18y agoAbsolute veracity is generally acknowledged to be a virtue, conflicting with the "utterly evil" trait. Thus, the pirates disappear in a puff of logic. This once again proves that conjectural sophistry based on impossible examples is categorically un-compelling.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mrtron 18y agoI find this sentence hilarious. Is it not a pun in itself? I can, without hesitation, not delaying for one second, not second guessing myself whatsoever, with certainty as broad as the universe itself...
- jessewmc 18y agoThis is a different kind of wrong though... You're talking about morally wrong, while the parent is talking about factually wrong. Also, though, in reference to the silly pirate example below, something being absolutely wrong does not prevent the possible necessity of doing that thing to prevent greater wrongs. Its still wrong, just possibly less wrong. So I would agree that eating children is wrong.