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| ▲ | datsci_est_2015 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus? This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent. | | |
| ▲ | Dracophoenix 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future. | | |
| ▲ | datsci_est_2015 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition. I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character. |
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| ▲ | drdaeman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Torment Nexus You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist? (And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.) | | |
| ▲ | datsci_est_2015 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Isn’t the purpose of all thought experiments to define something that is relevant to what you’re trying to philosophize about? “Fitting a narrative” is a thought-terminating cliché. If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird). That’s why I invoked the Torment Nexus. |
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| ▲ | wahnfrieden 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7DjEsFTlic it's also settler logic |
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| ▲ | J_McQuade 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it. Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right? | | |
| ▲ | Dracophoenix 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object. | |
| ▲ | db48x 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical. | | |
| ▲ | evan_ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The tool is a lump of metal apart from ethics, but making the cliterectomy-knife was a choice someone made. We can judge that decision. |
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