What's So Great About Ushas

Paul B · 11 Jul 2008, 19:03 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: pb.stuff at gmail.com (Paul B)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:03:59 -0400
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-W2543B565CE1241FE290423D7900 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-W2543B565CE1241FE290423D7900 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <3e1fa2e90807111203v12cd055dg2d12cbd824ef1d55 at mail.gmail.com>

Utilitarianism, which I defined rather than lectured about, is crucial to
this despite what you may say.  You base the argument for foreknowledge
giving moral exemption on the assumption that since the immoral action will
result in greater good, it is in fact moral.  This is again a definition of
utilitarianism.

Since we've come to silly examples, let me give you one as well then, it's
so time-worn it's practically polished.  You're a surgeon who can harvest
the organs of a single worthless hobo to save the lives of great men, and
you know this will work (you're a GOOD surgeon).  Is your doing this moral?
Like a fancy Hierogrammate, you have foresight in this one case, and killing
this hobo will in fact produce greater good.

Does your foreknowledge give you the moral justification for murder?

A utilitarian, incidentally, would agree.  This is why utilitarianism
matters.

Paul

On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 2:46 PM, b sharp <bsharporflat at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> Paul B I do think you are missing numerous hints that the Hiero-types are
> (as mentioned in my
> previous post) more omniscient and closer to the Increate in purpose than
> humans (and you
> shouldn't have tried to weaken my position by adding your own thought about
> power creating
> moral superiority ;-), I mentioned knowledge and foresight only).
>
> In more general terms, it seems to me you are stubbornly clinging to a
> fallacy:  that you are the
> equal in ability to make moral judgements to omniscient beings who can
> directly observe the future.
> You are not their equal.  You and all of us other humans can only guess
> what the consequence of an
>  action will be and make decisions based on judgement of statistical
> liklihood. I hope you are not trying
> to argue that a moral judgement can be made completely independent from the
> consequences of actions
> (making your moral framework very Beavisian in that cool stuff rocks and
> bogus stuff sucks).
>
> A room full of 4 year olds might get together and decide they should be
> provided with loaded automatic
> weapons to scare away monsters.  A philosopher child among them might argue
> that adults are bigger
> but possess no particular features that make them superior moral agents and
> the right thing to do would
> be to provide them with the monster protections they need. Paul, in the
> presence of God or Tzadkiel you
> are this child. As a human being, you (and I)  just don't know enough to
> judge the actions of God and
> angels. And I suspect you won't be getting your guns (unless perhaps you
> share your daycare with baby
> Adolph?  j/k  j/k).
>
> You might see the merit of this view in which an absolute certainty about
> the future is a tool which confers
> moral superiority or perhaps not (but please no more lectures about
> utilitarianism which is a merely human
> principle based on statistical liklihood of outcome.
>
> But you might argue that you are the equal of any intelligence in making
> moral judgements about the past
> where outcomes are set. If we pretend that reading history is equivalent to
> directly observing the past it
> might seem that when we humans observe the past we can see with certainty
> the full consequences of an
> action.
>
> However this also is false because, unlike Tzadkiel, we cannot see multiple
> threads and multiple outcomes
> based on many possible choices of action. We can only know what one choice
> was made, see the outcome
> of that choice and only guess whether that outcome would have been better
> or worse than if other choices
> were made.  God can see all possible choices and all possible outcomes
> making Him the perfect moral agent.
> Tzadkiel's ability approaches this making him/her far, far more morally
> advanced than an adult is to a child.
> Thus our own moral judgement of Tzadkiel's or God's actions is of
> negligible importance.
>
> -bsharp
>
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