Moral Philosophy - Tumblr Posts

It's kinda like how it scares me to see people trying to explain why since someone is a horrible person, they don't have to treat them with humanity. Like, yeah, the moment someone does enough bad things, their well-being becomes secondary to the need to make sure they won't do more harm... But why does it look like the end goal you're working towards is being allowed to drag a target to a point where we can kick it for daring to ask to be treated as human? That seems... Really dangerous, actually.

Okay so, like... I've been thinking a lot about how we societally treat ai. And, like... Don't get me wrong, there are definitely many legitimate arguments for why it shouldn't be used in creative contexts, but a lot of the rage I see against ai does often seem to kinda come down to "how dare this thing that isn't a person try and pretend to be a person deserving of human treatment", and, like... Can we just collectively try and think about this impulse critically, then try to place it in the context of any psychological, societal and historical mechanisms it might be related to? Why are you angry at a literal machine? The machine itself clearly can't be deserving of your anger, it's not sentient. You can argue for why it shouldn't be used in specific contexts... But then, again, why is the argument always phrased as if you're angry at the machine itself, and not at the people using it? Why do you hear "I fucking hate when people treat ai art like human art" more often than you hear "I fucking hate when rich people use ai to show how in their minds, creatives are nothing more than a tool"? Could it be that our instinctive urge to direct our rage at "a thing trying to claim a status of humanity that it doesn't deserve" is, em... Bad?

Just putting it out there.

As someone who was vegetarian from a young age, it was always weird to me that people acted like Cruella De Vil was a monster just because she went for dogs instead of, idk, foxes, snakes, whatever.

Westerners will argue that eating dogs is an objectively evil cultural practice because "they were domesticated to be human companions" like okay first of all look at how pigeons are treated in western countries today. Almost every single pigeon you see in urban and suburban environments are domestic pigeons they were domesticated over 10000 years ago, they have been common pets of humans throughout history and remain prized and protected in many parts of the world today. And your culture hunts them for sport, or poisons and maims them for the crime of shitting on cars and storefronts. I have a feeling your culture's exceptionalism around dogs is less about them being a domesticated animal, and more about framing nonwhite cultures as uncivilised. Second of all you're saying that a species' worth depends on its proximity to humans like that's supposed to convince me you care about animal welfare? Maybe you really do care, but regardless this argument does nothing but serve western hegemony

I actually have so much more respect for people who can't bring themselves to believe anything than I do for people who get so deeply entrenched in ideologies that they might take years or even their whole lives to ever come to reevaluate their values. Even though they, on average, tend to bring less effective results.

Like, evolution does what is affective, not what is objectively correct, since, like, the "objective" meaning of the world is that our perception cannot accurately model anything and therefore nothing we know is ever true and we just gotta commit to the bit and try to reduce that annoying bug of nature called "human suffering" by as much as possible, because our sense of pain is what our entire idea of "bad" is based on, but also it doesn't "objectively" matter because nothing ever does. But thinking in terms this abstract all the time is just... Kinda ineffective, and there is a sense of numb bliss in it that can be dangerously addictive if our collective understanding of morality has screwed you over in one way or another. And my respect for the people who get addicted to nihilism over people who get addicted to ideology is probably purely pavlovian, but like... One of them IS more closely correlated with intellectualism than the other, and misguided ideology tends to involve... Much more DIRECT denial of harm than simply going "I don't know".