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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28509 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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From "The Pragmatics of Patriotism" by Robert A. Heinlein:

Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival." I won't argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word "moral" to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define "behavior that tends toward extinction" as being "moral" without stretching the word "moral" all out of shape.

Or, as @HlynkaCG put it:

You claim that extinction is the morally correct choice. But that's absurd because morality is a property of consciousness and an extinct breed has no morals, correct or otherwise.

The only morality is civilization.

Then Heinlein has defined morality wrong. Indeed, if morality was the same as survival then there is no need for the separate word, and yet we incessantly find the need to define it separately.

The men from his example who tried and failed to save the woman from the train certainly acted in a noble way. "We will remember them", he writes, yet the act would have been no lesser if they were forgotten in an instant. Morality does not belong to a breed, it is individual, and as momentous as consciousness is. A civilization does not exist if there is no one to see it; clearly the value of civilization is in the people. A civilization, or a breed more generally, that keeps its constitutients in the negatives (inasfar as they are conscious and are able to perceive negatives), is nothing more than an egregoric parasite.

Any individual can see in an instant the difference between value and survival when he is struck by locked-in syndrome; so it is for civilizations.

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