[13of40]

I don't think I actually asserted anything, but let me give a shot at explaining:

The model is that higher values of G/B are better, where G is good years per capita and B is bad years per capita, so the ethical thing to do is maximize G and/or minimize B. I called this "basic" because even though it tends to fall apart when scaled up, I think it captures what most people think of ethics. It's good for making tactical decisions about things like "should I punch that guy" or whatever.

For #1, where ethics would be just a fiction we made up to support a social game, what I mean is: People in a group have to play a prisoners' dilemma game where they find a balance of cooperation and sharing of resources. One way to reach that balance is to assume good will and treat others like you want to be treated. (Right up until someone violates that, then it's hyperbolic response time...) If ethics is just something people made up to get everyone to maintain that balance, then higher G/B being better is rooted in the same fiction.

For #2: My definition of G and B included good and bad experiences by animals, not just people. That means it's possible that over a billion years or so you could still achieve higher G/B by going back to a "natural" world inhabited by sentient but less intelligent animals.

For #3: It could be that the G/B in a natural world would actually be lower than if it was dominated by humans, because several billion people being able to live out their lives before the crash could result in a big enough G value to outweigh the eventual suffering.

For #4: If life as a human counted more towards G than the same amount of life as a beaver, then it could be a force multiplier for #3.

[throwanem]

All of which follows from this assumption, which I'll grant you were slightly more overt about than the one I criticized:

> The way I see it, if you look at beavers, ants, or trees, they change the landscape but they do it based on behaviors that are encoded in their genes.

Having neatly begged the question of whether a distinction between "human" and "nature" has meaning - in the direction that it does, and on the basis of an understanding no more current than the behaviorism of the 1930s and 40s - you then proceed into the implications of a lot of arithmetic manipulations whose relevance you have declined to establish. So the complexity is wasted, at best without meaning and at worst deceptive by giving the impression of valid reasoning where none exists. (Soundness without validity isn't worthless, but where you aim to describe reality it certainly becomes so.)

To be clear, I don't assume you set out to deceive anyone here or anywhere else. But I have seen the identical technique on occasion deliberately used to that end, and much more often seen people so enthralled with the complexity of their reasoning as to totally overlook the vacuity of the premises from which it proceeds - not always, but mostly, and certainly by all appearances here.

This doesn't render the method totally useless; in my experience, people who hew strongly to it do a good if overly verbose and probably inadvertent job of explaining their own ethical judgment of the world. The trouble is, that's all it's any good for.

[13of40]

I apologize, but I'm trying to parse what you're saying and I can't seem to find the meat. I understand you're trying to insult me or whatever, but are you trying to say anything relevant to the topic?

[throwanem]

In response to a request for an ethical analysis of the question of whether the "human/natural" distinction has merit, you assumed that it does - in, again, a fashion demonstrating no knowledge of any research in animal behavior past about 1955 at the most generous possible outside - and then proceeded to give an analysis following solely from that outdated and frankly ignorant assumption. In consequence the analysis is entirely vacuous, and the effort that went into it wasted.

As a declaration of what you believe and a menu of justifications for same, it serves, but no one was asking for that. As a consideration of the question actually under discussion there is simply nothing here, and I don't see anything to suggest you have thus far even noticed the lack.

That is somewhat funny to me, I admit. It probably shouldn't be by now. The combination of overweening confidence in sound reasoning with total lack of care for valid premises is a common theme in online utilitarianism, but I think it's the shamelessness more than anything that gets me - like a Monty Python sketch that doesn't know it is one. A bad habit, I grant, but I think I still prefer it over that of not bothering first to find out what I know and what I don't.

[13of40]

I was in Jutland, in Northwest Denmark recently, and the backstory of that place is that a thousand years ago it was covered in thick pine forest. Medieval people cut the trees down for firewood and agriculture, which led to an ecological disaster from erosion that covered entire farms and villages in sand. Hundreds of years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, however, people started replanting forests and have had success in mitigating a lot of the erosion.

Now, knowing that the line between man and other animals is totally arbitrary, we should be fine to retell that story with beavers instead of people, right?

(I won't even get into how I flew there at 1000kph in a giant metal vehicle and carried a universal translator in my pocket, also neither of which were made by beavers.)

[throwanem]

If beavers had done that, why wouldn't we tell that story with beavers? They certainly do on occasion damage a local ecology whose hydrology they've failed to entirely consider. Their scope is smaller than ours in that regard, I grant, but I've also seen spiders and wasps perform feats of engineering that many wouldn't credit. I don't see reason to think what qualifies a project as the respectable product of ingenuity is only its size or the species of those who pursued it.

Addressing the question at hand is an improvement, but arguing your case entirely from assertion and anecdote leaves considerable further scope. You claim the difference is of kind rather than degree. I can see some credible arguments for that claim. Can you?