Fair warning; this is a subject on which I can natter nigh-endlessly
* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")
It just reformulates the problem, though. If there exists a set of all possible parallel universes, why has the postulated value of God chosen for this iteration of me to experience this particular parallel rather than any of the trivially imaginable ones that are better than this one is some straightforward obvious ways ?
* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance.
I have a strong query against that "naturally", and an even stronger against it being a reasonable basis for moral consideration if it happens that it is in our nature.
It seems pretty obvious to me, looking at the general course of human history, that the ability to build a civilisation, with all the advantages of civilisation such as penicillin, the internet, the rule of law and so on, requires an expansion of the range of empathy, of what counts as "us" and what "them"; if you're incapable of grasping that anyone outside your little hunter-gather tribe is also a person, you're never going to be able to build a city. This indicates that this aspect of human nature is mutable and to my mind the logical extension of this is that one maximises potential by regarding the entire species as "us"; nationalism seems to me to be a particularly weird aberration on a scale intemediate between the city and the species, and the sooner we can be rid of it the better.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 04:18 pm (UTC)* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")
It just reformulates the problem, though. If there exists a set of all possible parallel universes, why has the postulated value of God chosen for this iteration of me to experience this particular parallel rather than any of the trivially imaginable ones that are better than this one is some straightforward obvious ways ?
* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance.
I have a strong query against that "naturally", and an even stronger against it being a reasonable basis for moral consideration if it happens that it is in our nature.
It seems pretty obvious to me, looking at the general course of human history, that the ability to build a civilisation, with all the advantages of civilisation such as penicillin, the internet, the rule of law and so on, requires an expansion of the range of empathy, of what counts as "us" and what "them"; if you're incapable of grasping that anyone outside your little hunter-gather tribe is also a person, you're never going to be able to build a city. This indicates that this aspect of human nature is mutable and to my mind the logical extension of this is that one maximises potential by regarding the entire species as "us"; nationalism seems to me to be a particularly weird aberration on a scale intemediate between the city and the species, and the sooner we can be rid of it the better.