Why are you obsessed with the color of people’s skin and indifferent to their humanity? Should children be beaten, abused, mutilated, sold off to be married just because their parents are part of some abrahamic cult?

Daily reminder that religion is a monstrous evil.

No I actually don’t. I am very worried that Trump will win because she’s a little bland. IMO, she is more progressive than Biden and likely to make better decisions. I’m just stressing that she might be a little… bland for the American horde. They tend to expect an entertainer.

For an American president? I mean, yes, hence my complaint. But to be clear, that’s not something the presidential job of making good decisions technically requires, except insofar as electing an American politician has become tantamount to choosing a babysitter for the masses.

Ex Falso Quodlibet. Your moral reasoning is inconsistent, which means that you’re either a nihilist or an idiot. I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt.

“Murder” is an illegal killing. I don’t oppose murder; I oppose immoral killing. That’s different.

If you simply claimed that you’re against pointless killing I wouldn’t consider that arbitrary, since I share your strong intuition that causing meaningless suffering is deeply wrong. That is, in fact, precisely why I find it confusing that you would violate this intuition.

An arbitrary moral distinction would be like claiming that you are against ending innocent lives, unless they’re a different race, gender, species, nationality, or color than you, given that none of these factors have any moral relevance.

What is the moral significance of a creature’s nationality or species? Moral philosophers consider this question fairly settled, so let me know if you have some novel insights.

Unironically better candidate.

There’s a shitload of time. We’ve been conditioned to think it takes 2 years to run a presidential campaign. Nonsense.

Harris might be a disaster. I’ve no problem with her whatsoever personally, but she has no charm and zero leadership skill. I wish these things didn’t matter but they do.

Since human beings are also just animals, I assume you have some non-arbitrary reason for favoring one species over another?

Keep in mind that speciation is technically arbitrary, and that we can just as easily decide that you and I are not the same species. Go ahead, explain to me why I’m entitled to farm and eat you. I can’t wait to hear this.

I am not a nihilist.

Your words say one thing, but your other words say another.

Are you serious with this question?

You know what, I’ll help you out. Why not. We put down rabid dogs for two reasons. They pose a danger to everyone around them, and we can’t cure them. Psychopathy has these same relevant features. If you want to defeat this argument, your goal should be to attack the dog-human component of the analogy, not the disease component. Why? Well, because even if I granted that rabies and psychopathy do not share the relevant features of being incurable and dangerous, we would just be back to square one, when I point out that:

1. We put down dogs that attack children. And since dogs and humans are both animals, we should put down humans who attack children, too.

If you follow my advice and instead attack the human-dog comparison, you stand a better chance of defeating this analogy. Spoiler alert though, your efforts will fail. This is a really good analogy.

To succeed you’ll need to abandon your focus on moral justification and turn instead to the practical matters of administering a government. Why? Well, because despite your own feelings on the matter the vast majority of people have a strong intuition that evildoers should be destroyed, and you’ll have a better chance convincing them to get rid of the death penalty by pointing out that killing dangerous psychopaths is impractical rather than immoral.

You’re welcome. Don’t bother responding, because I blocked you.

killing innocent people is bad*

Now that we can agree about your hypocrisy, there’s not much left to discuss.

You’re right, none of us know anything. We can presume no facts, nor make even the most salient observations. All social science is false, and nihilists like you are right about everything.

If you hate killing so much, you must be vegan, right? Or do you kill some non-human animals but not other non-human animals?

Are you… trolling right now, or do you genuinely not understand how analogies work?

Do you formulate your opinions based on reasons you can articulate or is this just a fleeting thought you’re having?

Not all diseases are communicable or infectious. Psychopathy is a serious neurological pathology that robs humans of anything resembling humanity. That makes it a hell of a lot worse than rabies to my mind, but of course that’s debatable. Regardless, I’m not sure how ranking one horrible affliction against another makes much difference for this analogy.

Rabies and psychopathy are diseases. The prognosis is terminal in both cases, and death would be a mercy. Rabies is also far less harmful than psychopathy, because it results in less collateral damage. After all, psychopathy is responsible for almost every evil you can see in the world today from famine to poverty and war.

Again, there is an argument against the death penalty but protecting psychopaths ain’t it.