What's So Great About Ushas

b sharp · 13 Jul 2008, 18:11 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:11:15 -0400
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas
Message-ID: <BAY103-W19F8B48174C582FE7BCBCDD7920 at phx.gbl>

Lane, I think we do agree that capacity for moral judgement and capacity for moral 
behavior are different. But I think they are more related than you do.  It seems to 
me that greater capacity for moral judgement confers greater moral responsiblity. 
Thus animals are generally considered amoral (perhaps with the excpetion of rogue
elephants or trained tigers who turn on their trainers, thus breaking an established 
moral code?).  A small child who shoots and kills someone is not to blame, etc. A
white collar embezzler who steals from millionaires is going to prison.

The more you know, the better you are expected to act and the worse you are when
you transgress.  Thus, Hierogrammates, or angels must be expected to be far more
moral than humans.  A human murderer is a bad guy but a  fallen angel or demon 
(or megatherian?) is evil incarnate for ignoring God's commands, mating with humans, 
starting trouble on earth etc. They are supposed to know better.

Going back to my example from a previous post, we can't expect Hierogrammates to 
follow human morality any more than a human could be expected to follow gorilla society
morality, whatever that might be. Hierogrammates seem comfortable with genocide, as 
long as there is consent from a representative who manages to pass some incomprehensible
 test.  The Old Testament God didn't even bother with consent before the flood; just the ark 
was needed.

I get the impression there are those here who argue that genocide is always wrong, under all 
circumstances and it doesn't matter what degree of foresight the perpetrator has, genocide is 
always just plain EVIL. This is a very anthropocentric view but perhaps Justified.  Given that 
we don't seem to have any direct contact with superior beings at this time, perhaps a secular 
humanist view is superior to the religious view which grants superior morality to God and His 
agents.

But, since we are dealing with a work of fiction I'll continue to play Angel's Advocate. I'll again
state that we are unqualified to judge Hierogrammates and their actions because we don't have
the depth and breadth of foresight to do so.  Since Genesis is invoked I have to think that Wolfe
has put fallen Hierogrammates in his story who have corrupted Urth and humanity and only drastic
action by good, unfallen angels can provide salvation.  Game wardens.  Eliminating the diseased 
portion of a population so the healthy remainder has a chance to recover and re-populate.

So, as Angel's Advocate I am the gorilla trying to convince his fellows that the game warden is good 
because he is chasing away the poachers who kill us. And the anti-genocide secular humanists are 
the other gorillas who say, "it doesn't matter; not in the slightest. No matter how many of our lives 
are saved. Anyone who invades our territory with noisy metal boxes is EVIL"

I commend Lane who explained much better than I can why genocide might not be considered evil
by superhuman beings:

>But consider the Hieros. They aren't so bound to live life in one  
>direction, and indeed, may experience time and cause-effect in  
>_reverse_. For humans, then, we judge death, even the deaths of  
>millions, to be immoral or bad because we, bound up as we are in our  
>linear thinking, cannot conceive that there might be something truly  
>_after_ death.  I think that most people hope for an afterlife, but  
>none of us really knows, in the true sense of knowledge, that there is  
>such a thing.

-bsharp

_________________________________________________________________
Making the world a better place one message at a time.
http://www.imtalkathon.com/?source=EML_WLH_Talkathon_BetterPlace

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net