I’m wondering if EY is going to come through on this whole “Dumbledore is the Dark Lord and Quirrelmort was in the right all along” approach that he has hinted at recently. There’s a precedent here which raises my probability estimate of this slightly, [rot13 for spoilers from another EY story] va uvf fgbel “Gur Fjbeq bs Tbbq” gur gjvfg jnf gung gur ureb’f pubvpr orgjrra tbbq naq rivy jnfa’g n pubvpr bs juvpu bar gb sbyybj (gung jbhyq or boivbhf, pyrneyl) vg jnf gur zhpu uneqre pubvpr bs juvpu jnf juvpu. Gur “tbbq thlf” ghearq bhg gb or rivy naq gur “onq thlf” ghearq bhg gb or tbbq.
So from recent chapters it seems like we’re supposed to at least be considering the possibility of that Quirrelmort has been playing some colossal super-villain gambit this whole time in order to set up the rise of Light Lord Harry and defeat death once and for all, and that the Dark Lord prophesied to oppose all this is Dumbledore, who has marked Harry for his equal by nominating him as the future leader of the people he mistakenly believes to be The Good Guys and who wants us all to embrace death when it comes.
This concerns me a little bit, not because I don’t like the idea of Voldemort being secretly good but because it would be tragic for Dumbledore to turn out to be so evil. Don’t get me wrong, Dumbledore is greatly mistaken on many points but on the surface it doesn’t seem fair to call him a Dark Lord. His intentions seem to be better than almost every other person in the wizarding world, and it seems a bit rich to brand him with that label just because he opposed someone who was doing a very good job of pretending to be EVIL with a capital everything.
This, of course, is WORSE because it means that EY won’t do it like that—if Quirrel turns out to be good it will mean that Dumbledore has known the Voldemort gambit was a ploy all along, and has been actively opposing Quirrel’s attempt to reform the world because he doesn’t think the end justifies the means. And now he’s been broken further and further, forced to do more and more horrible things and turned into a monster just because he didn’t want monstrous things to happen! I just can’t help but think that it would have been better for Quirrel to sit down and talk this all out with Dumbles, but even if for some reason he couldn’t, I dunno if it’s fair to Dumbles to call him a Dark Lord since he was trying hard but got it wrong.
Of course there’s always the possibility that Dumbledore doesn’t care about the means and is just opposed to Quirrel because Quirrel wants to kill death. That would make Dumbledore more evil but be less tragic. It also seems a bit less believable that Dumbledore could be so smart but so intractable in his wrongness on this one point, though.
I don’t really think it’s probable that Dumbledore will become the next Dark Lord. The only thing that has happened so far to suggest this is the one line by Dumbledore in Chapter 84 (there might be other evidence but it would help if you would explicitly point it out). And I suppose there’s an argument to be made that Voldemort couldn’t have “marked Harry as an equal” since Harry was a baby who Voldemort expected to easily kill (which is why Voldemort didn’t bring reinforcements). And there’s probably some people on here who think Narcissa was burned alive (but I am almost certain that Dumbledore faked her death and that she is living in a secret OOTP base somewhere).
But I think the counter evidence is stronger. It’s too late in the story to suddenly change the villain, and Dumbledore probably wouldn’t have the opportunity or motive to cause mass death. Those points seem simpler and like stronger arguments than the above. Consider that, in canon, Voldemort attacking a baby was apparently enough to mark Harry as an equal. Also consider that Dumbledore was completely hysterical when he mentioned the possibility that he would become the next Dark Lord.
It would help if we actually knew what some of the unheard prophecies say. Maybe Dumbledore was misinterpreting one of them, and he doesn’t have to be a Dark Lord at all, but Harry would still fight him. That’s not a great solution and it’s actually less probable than anything above, but it does represent a kind of middle ground based on details and possibilities not yet made known to us.
And, I actually like the idea of Dumbledore being a Dark Lord who was corrupted by his power. I really don’t think it would be sad, because I’m not attached to canon Dumbledore very much. I actually don’t really care about any of the Canon!Harry Potter main characters, I just realized that. I only care about the minor characters, and thus far HPMOR has only improved those characters.
Dumbledore as Dark Lord just would be really cool. Maybe the rule of cool will outweigh my above probability based assessments, and he’ll end up being a Dark Lord. I hope so, at least, unless EY figures out something even cooler to do.
As far as evidence in the form of plot hints, I’ll have to go do a proper search when I’m not about to go to bed, but in the mean time…
IMHumbleO, there’s a strong case that Quirrel could be trying a supervillain gambit in order to make the world a better place. We know that there’s a Dark Lord >somewhere<, and if it’s not Quirrelmort then I think it can only be Dumbledore. Of course there is a whole spectrum of possibility here—maybe Quirrel is supervillain gambitting but is STILL the Dark Lord, maybe he isn’t but Dumbles is the Dark Lord anyway, &c, &c. Also relevant is the fact that Dumbledore seems to have access to the Philosopher’s stone but is not using it to save lives. I don’t understand why that is, and as a result it feels like there’s some major aspect of the Dumbledore-Voldemort dynamic that we’re in the dark about.
Anyway, without going through and marshaling all the evidence I’m not prepared to make a bet either way on how it’s all going to pan out. I do think the Dark Lord Dumbledore scenario is one that would have to be weighed in order to make such a bet, though, which is why I brought it up for discussion. I agree that that sort of ending could be done cool-ly. Whatever happens, I have a baaaaad feeling that Harry is going to find out that the world is a very, very ugly place pretty soon and I hope he comes through that without being irredeemably darkened.
(there might be other evidence but it would help if you would explicitly point it out)
There’s this, from chapter 80:
You would expect that chain of light to miss a step, sometime down through the centuries; that it would go astray at least once, and then never return. But it has not. The Line of Merlin continues, unbroken.
(Or so say those of Dumbledore’s faction. Lord Malfoy would tell you otherwise. And in Asia they tell other tales entirely, which may not make Britain’s version wrong.)
I think you’re confused about the meaning of Sword of Good. Without giving away too much, that is not the meaning I came up with. Instead I came away with the idea that everyone is the hero of their own story. Nobody is born innately evil
Dumbledore is good. Quirrell is good. Harry is good. Malfoy is good. But they’re each only playing out the morality they’ve learned. Malfoy’s morality about maintaining 1600s era stability and order and bringing prestige to the family. Dumbledore’s is a conservative evolution of his imperial/nationalist era morality that turned sour. Quirrel’s morality is difficult to discern, but I’d guess he was based on Randian Objectivism or Nietzschean philosophy. Harry’s morality is rationalist and singularitarian. It’s obvious to me that Harry’s morality is the only one that’s truly good. But then again I’m a rationalist singularitarian, and I bet people from other eras would look at the moralities differently.
I think the story is set up like this because that’s the way the world works. Everyone thinks they’re doing the good-and-right thing, but everyone has different starting points for their moralities. Wars occur because people have different ideas about what good-and-right is and how to achieve it. In real life, two good people sit down and talk to each other and neither one changes their mind, and the wars still happen. And the wars are not between good guys and bad guys, they’re between good guys and good guys.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that one of the premises behind both of these stories is that there is one objectively correct morality, given that a few basic definitions are shared. “If we agree that suffering is bad and that ~suffering is good then humanist, rational utilitarianism should follow directly,” or something.
I can definitely agree that acting in a way that fails to optimally minimise suffering is >bad<. I can even agree that in a lot of cases, punishing bad people will minimise further suffering. The problem is (and this is the message that I got from The Sword of Good) no one sane actually thinks of themselves as the bad guy of the story, and it takes an Act of Rational Intellect to make a justified choice about which side is actually right about being right.
The upshot is that I balk at the “evil” label. People are bad and good, only cartoon characters are evil because they do bad for bad’s sake. I guess in my head I think that to be a Dark Lord requires being Evil and not just bad. That might be a silly definition, since it means I’m essentially defining Dark Lords not to exist, but then again we only hear about them in children’s stories and HPMoR.
Sometimes (not every time) I get a twinge of subconscious worry when EY primes his argument-cannon with rational powder but emotional wadding. It makes for incredible chapters—I get fully body pins and needles whenever Harry does something amazing with a dementor—and when the emotion is humanist triumphal awe then it’s probably safe. I know the argument: there’s no reason why rationality and emotion have to weaken one another; emotion aimed by rationality can work to good ends. I just don’t want to confront a situation where Dumbledore ends up being the Dark Lord despite wanting to be a good guy and trying very, very hard—because there’s the risk there of sending the message that we should not only fight against powerful bad people, but hate them because they are Evil for not quite being smart enough. I don’t think that would be emotion aimed by rationality.
I know that’s not the sort of ending EY would craft, I only wonder how we >would< write a Dark Lord Dumbledore ending, and how likely it is that he will.
EDIT: I just re-read the “Are you enemies innately evil” article that Xachariah referenced, only this time I read it from the point of view of a moral relativist. I have gained an insight into how the other side thinks. I have also found even more motivation to make hard relativism extinct.
A form of relativism does follow from naturalism, as does a moral system which favors ones own gains above the gains of others. See: the babykillers story.
Egoism and relativism are actually pretty powerful arguments. “Good” does not exist external to perception or experience. I cannot experience the “good” of anyone else’s experience, except in an extremely diluted way through empathic networks, so in order to maximize the amount of good that exists I must try to maximize my own pleasure and achieve my own values. This doesn’t preclude helping others, we can be helpful to others if we enjoy or value being helpful, etc.
Everyone accepts relativism on a small scale, like with favorite colors. It’s not very different on a large scale, either. If someone is genetically modified to have a passionate drive to eat children, and has a burning desire to do so and sees nothing wrong with doing so, I think they should eat children. It’s not justifiable to hold people to obligations that they don’t internally recognize as correct, for the same reasons that “because God said so” is not an actual moral argument.
There’s an important difference between this kind of relativism and other kinds, though. The kind of relativism I’m trying to defend here doesn’t say that nothing is wrong and that all paths lead up the same mountain, or whatever. I’m trying to say that because morality is derived from inherent values, where those inherent values change we will get different moral answers for different people. But most humans share a lot of values, so this kind of relativism really doesn’t open itself up to the kind of gut-level criticism that most people throw at it, like the argumentum ad consequentum “but then everyone would murder everyone!” which is so popular.
I personally don’t follow any form of relativism, although I’m fairly selfish and egoist (yay rationality!), but that’s because my ethics are totally ad hoc and disorganized. I personally use a sort of story based virtue ethics to justify my actions (“what would a hero do?”; “what kind of hero am I?”). Stories are important to humans, so there’s probably a naturalistic or cultural justification somewhere in there, but I don’t really know what it is specifically.
Well, that’s the difference between hard relativism and soft relativism. Hard relativism holds that there is no “right”, and that’s the one I think has to go. Mind you, I think the relativism you describe is still a bit hard for me—I’d argue that whilst what is right is relative in the sense that it’s contingent on the situation at hand, within a given situation rightness is fixed and not at all dependent on one’s viewpoint. I certainly don’t agree that a relativism with any hardness to it follows from naturalism. I say this only to identify my position relative to your own, since this probably isn’t the right place for me to start trying to debate against your ethics. Plus it’s 2am and I spent all day at uni arguing ethics. I’m burnt out.
I read the baby-eaters story a while ago—I think I disagree with EY on that one, although it’s possible I misread it. I share his apparent belief that the baby-eaters had to be stopped: the babies were suffering and suffering=bad. I don’t see why the first, “fake” ending was the sad one, though—to me the second, “real” ending was the horrible one and the fake one was close enough to what I would have tried for if I’d been there. I am warning you now, if I ever meet super-intelligent aliens who want to raise the human race up from perdition and erase the need for suffering, I’m going to be on the side of the angels until humanity sorts it’s shit out.
If you think the humans should have stopped the Babyeaters, but you don’t think the Babyeaters were evil for pursuing the values that evolution gave them, then you agree that naturalism leads to the form of relativism I am defending and that this form of relativism is okay.
Well as I’ve said somewhere in this tree, I don’t like the “evil” label, so I’ll stick to “bad”. But I do think that the baby-eaters were bad, regardless of what they were evolved to do. There are a whole bunch of things that humans are evolved to do that I also think are morally wrong—I think that humans who do those things are bad. If we didn’t have a drive to do bad things, no one would ever do them and morality would be pointless. The baby-eaters perhaps shouldn’t be hated too much for being bad (in the story they weren’t as intelligent as humans and they thought slower) but in my books they definitely were bad, and had to be stopped.
So I don’t need to admit relativism for the sake of consistency. I think the homosexuality thing is probably a huge can of worms that would trap me in this thread for weeks if I opened it, so with your permission I’m going to let that one pass.
I also, by the way, think that the baby-eaters’ psychology was probably impossible, and their evolutionary path extremely contrived and unlikely. I know baby-eaters aren’t necessary to argue for relativism, but if they were then I would think that relativism was outlandish and absurd. On the other hand, I think my ethics still extends to this crazy borderline case, so I’m willing to allow it for discussion, but that’s a reflection of my confidence in my ethics, not the fitness of the thought experiment.
Anyway, I’m not trying to convince you—I only spoke out against relativism above to register my disapproval of extreme hard relativism, which you don’t appear to espouse. I look forward to your reply if you choose to make one, but I won’t rebut it because we are waaay off topic for the thread. :)
I’m wondering if EY is going to come through on this whole “Dumbledore is the Dark Lord and Quirrelmort was in the right all along” approach that he has hinted at recently. There’s a precedent here which raises my probability estimate of this slightly, [rot13 for spoilers from another EY story] va uvf fgbel “Gur Fjbeq bs Tbbq” gur gjvfg jnf gung gur ureb’f pubvpr orgjrra tbbq naq rivy jnfa’g n pubvpr bs juvpu bar gb sbyybj (gung jbhyq or boivbhf, pyrneyl) vg jnf gur zhpu uneqre pubvpr bs juvpu jnf juvpu. Gur “tbbq thlf” ghearq bhg gb or rivy naq gur “onq thlf” ghearq bhg gb or tbbq.
So from recent chapters it seems like we’re supposed to at least be considering the possibility of that Quirrelmort has been playing some colossal super-villain gambit this whole time in order to set up the rise of Light Lord Harry and defeat death once and for all, and that the Dark Lord prophesied to oppose all this is Dumbledore, who has marked Harry for his equal by nominating him as the future leader of the people he mistakenly believes to be The Good Guys and who wants us all to embrace death when it comes.
This concerns me a little bit, not because I don’t like the idea of Voldemort being secretly good but because it would be tragic for Dumbledore to turn out to be so evil. Don’t get me wrong, Dumbledore is greatly mistaken on many points but on the surface it doesn’t seem fair to call him a Dark Lord. His intentions seem to be better than almost every other person in the wizarding world, and it seems a bit rich to brand him with that label just because he opposed someone who was doing a very good job of pretending to be EVIL with a capital everything.
This, of course, is WORSE because it means that EY won’t do it like that—if Quirrel turns out to be good it will mean that Dumbledore has known the Voldemort gambit was a ploy all along, and has been actively opposing Quirrel’s attempt to reform the world because he doesn’t think the end justifies the means. And now he’s been broken further and further, forced to do more and more horrible things and turned into a monster just because he didn’t want monstrous things to happen! I just can’t help but think that it would have been better for Quirrel to sit down and talk this all out with Dumbles, but even if for some reason he couldn’t, I dunno if it’s fair to Dumbles to call him a Dark Lord since he was trying hard but got it wrong.
Of course there’s always the possibility that Dumbledore doesn’t care about the means and is just opposed to Quirrel because Quirrel wants to kill death. That would make Dumbledore more evil but be less tragic. It also seems a bit less believable that Dumbledore could be so smart but so intractable in his wrongness on this one point, though.
What do you guys think?
I don’t think the guy who doesn’t think twice about torturing or murdering anyone who slights him will turn out to be in the right all along.
That the only death Tom is opposed to is his own.
My viewpoint is essentially opposite yours, lolz.
I don’t really think it’s probable that Dumbledore will become the next Dark Lord. The only thing that has happened so far to suggest this is the one line by Dumbledore in Chapter 84 (there might be other evidence but it would help if you would explicitly point it out). And I suppose there’s an argument to be made that Voldemort couldn’t have “marked Harry as an equal” since Harry was a baby who Voldemort expected to easily kill (which is why Voldemort didn’t bring reinforcements). And there’s probably some people on here who think Narcissa was burned alive (but I am almost certain that Dumbledore faked her death and that she is living in a secret OOTP base somewhere).
But I think the counter evidence is stronger. It’s too late in the story to suddenly change the villain, and Dumbledore probably wouldn’t have the opportunity or motive to cause mass death. Those points seem simpler and like stronger arguments than the above. Consider that, in canon, Voldemort attacking a baby was apparently enough to mark Harry as an equal. Also consider that Dumbledore was completely hysterical when he mentioned the possibility that he would become the next Dark Lord.
It would help if we actually knew what some of the unheard prophecies say. Maybe Dumbledore was misinterpreting one of them, and he doesn’t have to be a Dark Lord at all, but Harry would still fight him. That’s not a great solution and it’s actually less probable than anything above, but it does represent a kind of middle ground based on details and possibilities not yet made known to us.
And, I actually like the idea of Dumbledore being a Dark Lord who was corrupted by his power. I really don’t think it would be sad, because I’m not attached to canon Dumbledore very much. I actually don’t really care about any of the Canon!Harry Potter main characters, I just realized that. I only care about the minor characters, and thus far HPMOR has only improved those characters.
Dumbledore as Dark Lord just would be really cool. Maybe the rule of cool will outweigh my above probability based assessments, and he’ll end up being a Dark Lord. I hope so, at least, unless EY figures out something even cooler to do.
As far as evidence in the form of plot hints, I’ll have to go do a proper search when I’m not about to go to bed, but in the mean time… IMHumbleO, there’s a strong case that Quirrel could be trying a supervillain gambit in order to make the world a better place. We know that there’s a Dark Lord >somewhere<, and if it’s not Quirrelmort then I think it can only be Dumbledore. Of course there is a whole spectrum of possibility here—maybe Quirrel is supervillain gambitting but is STILL the Dark Lord, maybe he isn’t but Dumbles is the Dark Lord anyway, &c, &c. Also relevant is the fact that Dumbledore seems to have access to the Philosopher’s stone but is not using it to save lives. I don’t understand why that is, and as a result it feels like there’s some major aspect of the Dumbledore-Voldemort dynamic that we’re in the dark about.
Anyway, without going through and marshaling all the evidence I’m not prepared to make a bet either way on how it’s all going to pan out. I do think the Dark Lord Dumbledore scenario is one that would have to be weighed in order to make such a bet, though, which is why I brought it up for discussion. I agree that that sort of ending could be done cool-ly. Whatever happens, I have a baaaaad feeling that Harry is going to find out that the world is a very, very ugly place pretty soon and I hope he comes through that without being irredeemably darkened.
There’s this, from chapter 80:
I think you’re confused about the meaning of Sword of Good. Without giving away too much, that is not the meaning I came up with. Instead I came away with the idea that everyone is the hero of their own story. Nobody is born innately evil
Dumbledore is good. Quirrell is good. Harry is good. Malfoy is good. But they’re each only playing out the morality they’ve learned. Malfoy’s morality about maintaining 1600s era stability and order and bringing prestige to the family. Dumbledore’s is a conservative evolution of his imperial/nationalist era morality that turned sour. Quirrel’s morality is difficult to discern, but I’d guess he was based on Randian Objectivism or Nietzschean philosophy. Harry’s morality is rationalist and singularitarian. It’s obvious to me that Harry’s morality is the only one that’s truly good. But then again I’m a rationalist singularitarian, and I bet people from other eras would look at the moralities differently.
I think the story is set up like this because that’s the way the world works. Everyone thinks they’re doing the good-and-right thing, but everyone has different starting points for their moralities. Wars occur because people have different ideas about what good-and-right is and how to achieve it. In real life, two good people sit down and talk to each other and neither one changes their mind, and the wars still happen. And the wars are not between good guys and bad guys, they’re between good guys and good guys.
But that’s the world we live in.
No, Argency summarized it well. It isn’t a treatise on moral relativism.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that one of the premises behind both of these stories is that there is one objectively correct morality, given that a few basic definitions are shared. “If we agree that suffering is bad and that ~suffering is good then humanist, rational utilitarianism should follow directly,” or something.
I can definitely agree that acting in a way that fails to optimally minimise suffering is >bad<. I can even agree that in a lot of cases, punishing bad people will minimise further suffering. The problem is (and this is the message that I got from The Sword of Good) no one sane actually thinks of themselves as the bad guy of the story, and it takes an Act of Rational Intellect to make a justified choice about which side is actually right about being right.
The upshot is that I balk at the “evil” label. People are bad and good, only cartoon characters are evil because they do bad for bad’s sake. I guess in my head I think that to be a Dark Lord requires being Evil and not just bad. That might be a silly definition, since it means I’m essentially defining Dark Lords not to exist, but then again we only hear about them in children’s stories and HPMoR.
Sometimes (not every time) I get a twinge of subconscious worry when EY primes his argument-cannon with rational powder but emotional wadding. It makes for incredible chapters—I get fully body pins and needles whenever Harry does something amazing with a dementor—and when the emotion is humanist triumphal awe then it’s probably safe. I know the argument: there’s no reason why rationality and emotion have to weaken one another; emotion aimed by rationality can work to good ends. I just don’t want to confront a situation where Dumbledore ends up being the Dark Lord despite wanting to be a good guy and trying very, very hard—because there’s the risk there of sending the message that we should not only fight against powerful bad people, but hate them because they are Evil for not quite being smart enough. I don’t think that would be emotion aimed by rationality.
I know that’s not the sort of ending EY would craft, I only wonder how we >would< write a Dark Lord Dumbledore ending, and how likely it is that he will.
EDIT: I just re-read the “Are you enemies innately evil” article that Xachariah referenced, only this time I read it from the point of view of a moral relativist. I have gained an insight into how the other side thinks. I have also found even more motivation to make hard relativism extinct.
A form of relativism does follow from naturalism, as does a moral system which favors ones own gains above the gains of others. See: the babykillers story.
Egoism and relativism are actually pretty powerful arguments. “Good” does not exist external to perception or experience. I cannot experience the “good” of anyone else’s experience, except in an extremely diluted way through empathic networks, so in order to maximize the amount of good that exists I must try to maximize my own pleasure and achieve my own values. This doesn’t preclude helping others, we can be helpful to others if we enjoy or value being helpful, etc.
Everyone accepts relativism on a small scale, like with favorite colors. It’s not very different on a large scale, either. If someone is genetically modified to have a passionate drive to eat children, and has a burning desire to do so and sees nothing wrong with doing so, I think they should eat children. It’s not justifiable to hold people to obligations that they don’t internally recognize as correct, for the same reasons that “because God said so” is not an actual moral argument.
There’s an important difference between this kind of relativism and other kinds, though. The kind of relativism I’m trying to defend here doesn’t say that nothing is wrong and that all paths lead up the same mountain, or whatever. I’m trying to say that because morality is derived from inherent values, where those inherent values change we will get different moral answers for different people. But most humans share a lot of values, so this kind of relativism really doesn’t open itself up to the kind of gut-level criticism that most people throw at it, like the argumentum ad consequentum “but then everyone would murder everyone!” which is so popular.
I personally don’t follow any form of relativism, although I’m fairly selfish and egoist (yay rationality!), but that’s because my ethics are totally ad hoc and disorganized. I personally use a sort of story based virtue ethics to justify my actions (“what would a hero do?”; “what kind of hero am I?”). Stories are important to humans, so there’s probably a naturalistic or cultural justification somewhere in there, but I don’t really know what it is specifically.
Well, that’s the difference between hard relativism and soft relativism. Hard relativism holds that there is no “right”, and that’s the one I think has to go. Mind you, I think the relativism you describe is still a bit hard for me—I’d argue that whilst what is right is relative in the sense that it’s contingent on the situation at hand, within a given situation rightness is fixed and not at all dependent on one’s viewpoint. I certainly don’t agree that a relativism with any hardness to it follows from naturalism. I say this only to identify my position relative to your own, since this probably isn’t the right place for me to start trying to debate against your ethics. Plus it’s 2am and I spent all day at uni arguing ethics. I’m burnt out.
I read the baby-eaters story a while ago—I think I disagree with EY on that one, although it’s possible I misread it. I share his apparent belief that the baby-eaters had to be stopped: the babies were suffering and suffering=bad. I don’t see why the first, “fake” ending was the sad one, though—to me the second, “real” ending was the horrible one and the fake one was close enough to what I would have tried for if I’d been there. I am warning you now, if I ever meet super-intelligent aliens who want to raise the human race up from perdition and erase the need for suffering, I’m going to be on the side of the angels until humanity sorts it’s shit out.
If you think the humans should have stopped the Babyeaters, but you don’t think the Babyeaters were evil for pursuing the values that evolution gave them, then you agree that naturalism leads to the form of relativism I am defending and that this form of relativism is okay.
An equivalent: the homosexuality “debate”.
Well as I’ve said somewhere in this tree, I don’t like the “evil” label, so I’ll stick to “bad”. But I do think that the baby-eaters were bad, regardless of what they were evolved to do. There are a whole bunch of things that humans are evolved to do that I also think are morally wrong—I think that humans who do those things are bad. If we didn’t have a drive to do bad things, no one would ever do them and morality would be pointless. The baby-eaters perhaps shouldn’t be hated too much for being bad (in the story they weren’t as intelligent as humans and they thought slower) but in my books they definitely were bad, and had to be stopped.
So I don’t need to admit relativism for the sake of consistency. I think the homosexuality thing is probably a huge can of worms that would trap me in this thread for weeks if I opened it, so with your permission I’m going to let that one pass.
I also, by the way, think that the baby-eaters’ psychology was probably impossible, and their evolutionary path extremely contrived and unlikely. I know baby-eaters aren’t necessary to argue for relativism, but if they were then I would think that relativism was outlandish and absurd. On the other hand, I think my ethics still extends to this crazy borderline case, so I’m willing to allow it for discussion, but that’s a reflection of my confidence in my ethics, not the fitness of the thought experiment.
Anyway, I’m not trying to convince you—I only spoke out against relativism above to register my disapproval of extreme hard relativism, which you don’t appear to espouse. I look forward to your reply if you choose to make one, but I won’t rebut it because we are waaay off topic for the thread. :)
Sure thing, that all means that you don’t support (pure) naturalism, which is okay with me even if I like naturalism.
I agree. What a pleasant conversation. This is why I love Less Wrong.