I was home schooled from childhood through highschool. I got a GED before I joined the military, then used the GI bill to go to university and took placement tests for everything, which put me at the same level as everyone else except for trigonometry, which I had to take a remedial class in.

Yeah, the US grade system up to highschool. I haven’t done those grades at all.

Never have I ever gone to school in grades K-12.

Bonus fucked

I have butchered squirrels, deer, turkey, snakes, catfish, goats, pigs, and rabbits. Went vegetarian two years ago for ethical reasons though, so I guess I don’t get to raise my hand lol

I’m probably going to get some hate for this one, but Spider-Man: Across The Spiderverse. The story wasn’t as tight as the first movie, they introduced too many new characters to keep up with, and it ended with a setup for the next movie.

I heard a story about a guy doing something similar, but it was his internet connection speed and instead of submitting a noise complaint it tweeted at his service provider.

See what Hackworth said about the robots, also, there are multiple ongoing projects that hope to change the existing construction processes enough that android-style robots won’t be necessary. 3d printing houses, for example.

The jobs that will be safe longest are those that are both physical and unpredictable/non-standardizable.

Yeah, it took me a bit to wrap my head around it. It’s worth it to avoid subtle, weird, and hard to diagnose bugs later on.

As a Rust programmer, I approve this message. Tumbling through a turbine repeatedly would be less stressful than working on a large python/js codebase.

Clear case of demon possession.

Congratulations man!

(2/2)

Conclusion

Your views are incoherent

I’ve assumed throughout, that a fertilized egg has the same sort of moral weight as a child or an adult human being, for simplicity. I don’t actually believe this, however. You apparently do. Why? Because an egg has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience”? Pluripotent stem cells, as you said, also meet this standard. If that’s the case, so do skin cells, with the appropriate technology. Fertilized eggs, as you also said, don’t always meet this standard- I assume because 40% of fertilized eggs fail to implant. So if the only rule you have for what “counts” (has the moral weight of a person) is that it has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience”, and you’re specifically excluding eggs that are fertilized but don’t implant, and including stem cells that we have artificially coaxed into fertilization, then why is an aborted egg considered a violation of your morality, but stem cells thrown in the trash aren’t?

There’s no dividing line between one and the other, except the word “reasonable” in your “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” definition. By which you mean “reasonable to me”. A fertilized egg has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” to you, right up until it fails to implant- and then it doesn’t anymore. A fertilized egg that implants has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” right up until an abortion- and then it’s murder.

The only differentiator here is your opinion.

You claim that rescuing fertilized eggs from a burning IVF clinic is morally equal to rescuing children from the same burning building, but when I imagine a world in which everyone acts on this claim, it’s absurd. You yourself wouldn’t behave in the way you’re describing, but would leave the eggs to burn in order to rescue a single child- no matter how many eggs there were. You claim, further, that this is because there is a difference between the psychological weight we place on people that look like us (children), and not on people who don’t (fertilized eggs), but when asked how one might go about differentiating between a psychological impulse and a “true” moral intuition, your answer is that an intuition isn’t a moral intuition “if the basis for it is too complex”, which feels a lot like saying “you’ll know it when you see it.”

You don’t consider bodily autonomy to be a fundamental right, despite it’s simplicity, despite probably sharing the same moral intuitions that I do in many of the scenarios that I’ve discussed above. If someone were surgically connected to you, should you be able to say “no”, whether it would kill them or not, whether it’s the heroic thing to do or not? If you were drowning, and someone were using you as a life preserver, should you have the right to push them away, whether or not they would drown, whether or not it would haunt you afterward?

You fail to see that your dismissal of bodily autonomy, when taken to it’s conclusion, leads to even more absurdity. If you don’t have the fundamental right to reject someone’s use of your body, what gives you the right to deny society access to your organs? If it would save dozens of living, breathing people, and you have no right to deny the use of your body, what fundamental principle do you invoke to avoid getting used for parts? A vague claim that “forcing an action is stronger than denying an action”?

Without a fundamental principle of bodily autonomy, you’re forced to patch together ad-hoc and weak explanations like this in which you weigh different “types” of actions, try to estimate harm, or appeal to societal consequences in order to justify your right to deny other people the organs they need to survive.

The only conclusion that I can draw from this discussion is that you started with the belief that life begins at conception and should be preserved at all costs, likely for religious or social reasons, and are working backward in order to justify those beliefs.

Thanks for the conversation

It’s been interesting.

I’ve learned a lot about what you believe and why you believe it, and it’s given me the opportunity to clarify and refine some of the things that I believe. I think that, regardless of whatever credentials you do or don’t have on this topic in real life, your views are contradictory and confusing- but I appreciate your willingness to put them out there for discussion. I think that I’ve gotten all the use out of the discussion that I can, however, so I’m going to end it here.

I imagine that you’ll want to do a closing rebuttal sort of thing. I won’t be replying to whatever you have to say, so, if you celebrate-

Merry Christmas!

(1/2)

I’m not making the argument that you think I’m making.

Bodily autonomy as a fundamental right

Bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of my moral intuitions. I intuit that it’s wrong to rape. It can’t be because of the physical harm, because it’s still intuitively wrong to rape someone if you drug them and are gentle. It can’t be because of the mental harm, because it’s still intuitively wrong to rape them if they’re unconscious and will never know. Murder is wrong and remains wrong even if it causes no pain, even if the murdered person is unaware that they are being murdered. In both of these cases, you’re using someone else’s body without their consent.

This principle, that people should be able to control who can use or modify their body, and for what, is an assumption in the same way that you’ve described other fundamental moral principles- because it makes sense of our intuitions. Once we derive the principle from our intuitions, we can use it to clarify edge cases. To take one example- assisted suicide. Is it wrong? Bodily autonomy says no. If someone asks you to kill them and they sincerely want to die, then it’s not wrong. This is borne out when we compare what the principle says to what we see in society: while there are any number of (valid) concerns involving coercion, informed consent, and mental health, there are also hundreds of stories and legends about human beings helping each other to die. That it happens is tragic, but the act itself is intuitively morally permissible.

To me, the idea that bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle seems fairly obvious, and I think it’s obvious to most people when not discussing abortion. If someone is using your body without your consent, you feel morally justified in rejecting them.

My view on abortion

As I said at the start, I’m not making the argument that you think that I’m making. I don’t intuitively consider a fertilized egg to be a person, but I do intuitively consider a five-year-old to be a person. I’m not sure where you would draw a line to divide non-person from person and so I don’t: I assume that everything from conception onward counts as a person because it seems good to err on the side of granting person-hood when in doubt.

I still support abortion until viability.

We have two people, one of whom is using the other in order to survive. My fundamental moral principle of bodily autonomy says that the person being used can withdraw their consent and reject the use of their body. But, in this case, the user will die if they are rejected. Does the principle still hold? Does one person’s right to life trump another person’s bodily autonomy? If I concoct alternative scenarios in which the same rights are at odds, my intuitions seem to come down on the side of bodily autonomy.

Some scenarios

The scenarios

Imagine that two people are drowning in the ocean and one can’t swim. The non-swimmer clings to the swimmer, who is able to support them both but with an increased risk of drowning. The swimmer finally shrugs off the non-swimmer and the non-swimmer drowns.

I intuitively feel that a virtuous person would have struggled on and done their best to save the non-swimmer. That would be the heroic thing to do. Refusing to support the non-swimmer, however, is morally permissible. This scenario isn’t as good an analogy as it could be, because there’s no direct bodily violation, but two agents relying on each other to act in particular ways. Lets see if we can find something more directly applicable.

Imagine that one person agrees to have their body surgically connected to another in such a way that their organs will do the work of keeping both people alive. The supporting person finally requests that they be separated again, killing the supported person.

Much as in the previous scenario, I can feel both that the virtuous thing to do would be to soldier on and that it’s morally permissible to make the decision to leave the supported person to die- in fact, I feel that it’s more morally permissible than in the last scenario. Crucially, in this scenario, one is actually violating the body of the other, rather than relying on them to act in a particular way. What happens if we go the other way?

Imagine that one person is sitting by a pond when they suddenly realize that another person is drowning. They decide that, for whatever reason, they will not act to save the person’s life.

I feel that a virtuous person would act to save the drowning person, obviously. My moral intuitions about what should and shouldn’t be permissible are torn, in this case. In general, they still grudgingly come down on the side of the person failing to act, but there are caveats and special cases. Looking at the law as a proxy for what society feels on the subject, I see that they mostly agree with me.

My conclusion

In each of these scenarios, one person is refusing to allow their body to be used by another when the life of the other is on the line. In each scenario, my intuitions come down on the side of the person doing the refusing- strongly, when the use is direct and invasive, weakly when it involves independent behavior and action. So bodily autonomy seems to hold as a fundamental principle.

Application To abortion

During a pregnancy, we have two people, one of whom is using the other in order to survive. The mother decides that she no longer wishes to allow the use of her body, and gets an abortion. Much as in the previous examples, I may consider it virtuous to carry the child to term, but I can’t deny that she should have the fundamental right to reject the non-consensual use of her body.

At this point, I think it should be clear why I think this.

Abortion, of course, is more than just denying someone the use of your body- it involves killing the fetus as well. If the fetus can’t survive on it’s own in the world, then arguing about this is, to me, moral hair-splitting. Person or not, killed by a doctor or killed by exposure, the fetus is still dead. Where I deviate from the standard liberal position on abortion is when the fetus can survive on it’s own. At that point (and granted, that “point” is more of a gray area), both the mother’s right to bodily autonomy and the fetus’ right to life can be upheld and it now matters whether the fetus counts as a person.

My rule of thumb, as I said earlier, is to err on the side of person-hood when in doubt and so I think that post-viability abortions are not morally permissible.

Continued In Reply

When you are trying to establish if something exists you don’t assume that it’s already true

Where do rights come from, in your view?

Both individuals are acting morally by saving others, although saving more people is a better outcome.

Why does a potential human being have a right to life that is equal to an existing life?

The game Chex Quest, which was a total conversion of Doom for kids, used as an advertising campaign and included in cereal boxes. Incredibly well done game.

I already showed that there wasn’t if you actually read anything

First, I haven’t found any place where you did this. Second, if you did show that “no existing right to bodily autonomy [is] sufficiently strong”, I think you probably need to also show why the law isn’t in the wrong, rather the moral beliefs of the people in this thread.

Nobody seriously contested it.

I mean, people are. It’s a conversation that’s still happening.

…that has been largely abandoned in ethics.

Gonna need a citation on that one, boss.

Anyone else that comes along can follow along in the main conversation with @jasory@programming.dev and myself over here.

The reasons why one would save a 5-year old, are not fundamental moral principles but purely psychological

How do you identify when a moral rule is a fundamental principle versus a psychological preference?

…even if we have no reason to believe them [the five year old] to be more morally valuable [than the eggs].

In your view, is someone who saves twenty viable eggs over a five year old a more moral person than someone who does the reverse? (in some sort of ideal sense, regardless of whether anyone would do this or not)

The problem here is that if you want to show that something is true, you can’t rely on premises being true that require the conclusion to be true…

I don’t think that I’m engaging in any circular reasoning. I’m not trying to argue that bodily autonomy is good- I’m making the base assumption that bodily autonomy is good and should be treated as a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of a lot of moral intuitions that I have. That’s not any more circular or arbitrary than any other moral principle.

EDIT: Also, I appreciate you getting back to me, and in case we don’t talk again until after the holidays, Merry Christmas!

I had Kagi for a bit and enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I use search enough to justify the price tag.

I didn’t know about the personalized SEO thing- I wonder if you could have a “default SEO rank” that would basically average all the specific uprank/downranks from other users. So power users tweak their algo, and everyone else gets the benefit of using that human feedback to improve their results.

Yep, it’s the same muscle. If you’ve noticed your glasses moving, then you’ve got it and you just need to practice.