[card_zero]

What?

I'm not doing those things, I'm making an epistemological point that I think is important, though it's an old one I picked up from reading Gödel, Escher, Bach in the 80s, but I do quite sincerely think that arguments that rely on reductionism are bad and frequently silly. Yet I also think that reductio ad absurdum is a crucial form of critical thought. Reductionism claims "there are no emergent properties when the parts are assembled", whereas reductio ad absurdum says "there's something that your simple rule doesn't account for", so it really is opposed to reductionism, unless it's carried out by misrepresenting the rule as being foolishly simple when it wasn't simple.

This is admittedly something of a sidetrack from the question of exploitation.

In the argument near the top of the thread, the point made is of course that lots of mundane and innocent things are the product of meddling with nature. I can't make sense of the phrase "exploitation is more important than its mere existence", by "its", do you refer to the existence of exploitation? Was that topic raised? I can't find the context. I don't understand what you're saying, but I'm picking up "when exploitation is bad, it's immoral", which is true by definition. But I suppose the unanswered question is why it's bad exploitation to make a cockroach into a robot.