Viva Forever

First and foremost, Amanda, I’d like to thank you for numbering your paragraphs here. This will allow me to reference what part of your response I’m replying to without adding further bulk to my comment by quoting you.

Amanda Point 1)
You claim that karmic retribution of some form will be visited for every misdeed one commits, sometimes literally, sometimes emotionally, or sometimes in another life. You can in no way prove this claim, and by the very non-disprovable nature of multiple-life inheritance, noone ever could. It is a meaningless assertion. There is no evidence that anyone could ever provide to prove this assertion wrong, therefore if it was wrong you would be incapable of ever realising that it is so. This is why one must never credit non-disprovable assertions.

Amanda Point 2)
Your account of whether the universe is fair or not appears pretty inconsistent, Amanda. At some points you have suggested that the world is visibly karmic and balanced, now you are suggesting that the world is visibly unfair, but is unmeasurably evened out over multiple lifespans.
Just to recap, neither Chantelle nor myself have ever suggested that the world is a fair place, nor do we suggest that it should be. You are the only one who has suggested that the world either is or should be fair, and have attempted to resolve this claim with the presumed existence of karma. I was merely pointing out that even the fictitious karma system you support would not be fair for anyone involved in it. There is simply no way to argue that universal, retributive justice exists.

Amanda Point 3)
You make a good number of fallacious assertions here.
First, you imply that one cannot ‘intellectually understand’ facets of a culture or society if one is not a member of it. This is untrue, and you have made no attempt to justify why you think I don’t understand the ethical positions of a variety of cultures.
I am also lead to believe that you did not comprehend what I was trying to say in my previous comment in regard to my own ethical stance. My personal ethics are in no direct way guided by the ethical standards of the culture in which I was raised, I have actively rejected these standards, finding them unjustified, inadequate or misguided. I utilise rational ethics, and rational ethics alone, which exist independent of any traditional cultural standard.
You then make the quite remarkable claim that I am being racist in finding the ethical standards of all cultures inadequate. Your phrasing suggests that I am coming from a ‘western’ ethical orientation. This is untrue. You then say I would be “automatically” declaring the other systems inferior. This is also untrue, as I take the time to review the details and reasoning of every cultural standard I have ever commented on, and would see no point in even attempting to comment on a stance who’s details I have never considered. Finally, and most bafflingly, you suggest that it would be racist for me to attempt to apply my judgements to the standards of another culture. Not only does this statement imply a unity between race and culture that is defintionally incredibly racist (as it is the presumption that intellectual properties or beliefs can be perscribed on the basis of race), but it overlooks the simple contradiction in your position. You are somehow suggesting that it is less racist to apply different standards of judgement to different races, and more racist to treat different races with equality. This is wrong on every account.

You then go on to suggest that rational ethics is flawed, because people (especially with regard to strangers) tend to be self-interested. This is, however, entirely untrue.
You make the assertion that it is “undeniably” more ethical to save the life of a stranger in the place of your own. While this is true by western cultural conventions, and resonates with most conceptions of ‘nobility’, this is not true under rational ethics. By the standards of rational ethics, the value of any person’s life is connected to their capacity to experience happiness, suffering, and agency, and your perceived duties to a person are the result of your awareness of these three conditions. Therefore, in rational ethics (as in the intuitive stance of all people, as you said) your first loyalty is to yourself, and your perceived duty to others is proportional to your awareness of their condition. You have no obligations to aid those whose suffering you are unaware of, and it is only when conditions of awareness personally involve you with the state of others, that you will feel obliged to foresake your self-interest for the benefit of another.
This is why we feel (and are) accountable for the harm we knowingly do to others. Why we are more likely to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of a close friend than a stranger. Why the reciprocal caring interest of other people is an immense source of personal satisfaction.
There is a kind of irony inherent to ethical traditions that over-emphasise self-sacrifice, as they seem to suggest that a persons well being must be supported at all costs, unless that person happens to be you.

Amanda Point 4)
Here you seem to be pitting the concepts of “diversity as good” and “self-improvement” against each other. But this establishes a false dichotomy between encouraging ethical behaviour and foresaking diversity, or supporting diversity and foresaking encouraged ethical behaviour.
To do so is to imply that different degrees of expressed cruelty are a fundamental constituent of a person, and that attempts to change this would result in a ’slippery-slope’ form of variation loss. In essence, that more uniform behaviour in this domain would foster uniformity in all domains.
This is untrue, not only because people differ on a range of dimensions that is tremendously diverse, but because it fails to credit the importance and ongoing occurence of personal changes.
This is a peculiar correction to have to make to a Buddhist, but it is fallacious to consider people as static objects with a list of properties that identify them. People, rather, are processes, that exist in an ongoing sequence of personal changes. One therefore cannot insist that a suggested ‘change’ to a person is in any way a bad thing, or a loss of ‘what makes them who they are’.
When the embracing of ethical behaviour not only increases the rational validity of one’s actions, but also benefits all of the people they would otherwise mistreat with less ethical behaviour, every person involved benefits and it is only a particular domain of ‘diversity’ that suffers. But to suggest that ethical behaviour should not be encouraged in order to maintain diversity in this domain, is to request that many people stagnate their personal growth, and countless others experience more suffering than they need to, simply for the sake of diversity as a principle. This is, befittingly, a highly unethical stance.
Again, would you encourage that more people conduct ritual human sacrifice (which is no longer done in the modern world), simply to increase the diversity of behaviours and ethical beliefs that exist? I should hope not.

Amanda Point 5)
What you have literally done here, is quoted a small section from the middle of my paragraph out of context, in an attempt to validate the belief that the paragraph disproves. The quoted line “the conscious experience of them can be gradiated by mental comparison” is preceded by a “while”, and is followed by “their occurence and literal intensity are in no way contingent on what you have or have not already experienced”. This means, again, that a person who has never experienced great dispair can and will experience great hope when the appropriate situation arises. We possess innate cognitive pathways that cause certain sensations to trigger parts of the nucleus accumbens, substantia nigra and amygdala in specific patterns. These neural activations are the phenomenological sensations of happiness, suffering, expectation, etc, that we feel when situations strike us. They are gradiated within small degrees by contextual experiences, but in no way depend on them to occur.
I really should add that, even if neuroscience did not possess as advanced an understanding of the human brain as it does today, your position would still be an untenable one, on the basis of simple logical consistency. You say that opposing experiences, essentially, contextualise human perception to each other, which is to say, someone who has not known happiness can not experience sadness, or vice versa. But this is a self-defeating position.
Imagine a small child, a tabula rasa (in Lockean terms), who has never experienced much of anything. Suppose something truly spectacular were to happen to it, you would suggest that it would be incapable of experiencing/recognising great joy, as it had never experienced great sadness or suffering. Very well. But then suppose, instead, that something immensely horrible were to happen to the same child. Would they be incapable of experiencing/recognising great suffering, because they have never experienced great joy? By your telling, presumably so. But then.. where is the starting point? If every experience needs the context of its experiential opposite to be appreciated, how does anyone ever come to experience anything? And even if this child may, say, experience great happiness, but not recognise it, but then be capable of experiencing great suffering because they experienced happiness before, but didn’t recognise it.. doesn’t this make the role of ‘recognising’ an experience meaningless, since any experience you have but can’t appreciate will eventually be retroactively validated by future experiences? It simply doesn’t work.

In regard to your final paragraph, you would be mistaken to suggest that I would be unhappy in a world full of exceptionally moral people, as this would suggest that attempting to correct the moral misdirection of others is my single source of happiness. It is not, just as I imagine being cruel to “idiots” isn’t the only thing you enjoy. The only essential difference to the world would be that countless people would not have to endure discomfort, displeasure, and even suffering, at the wilful hands of people who feel they can justify the knowing mistreatment of others.
In a world of entirely (or even more) ethical people, potential antagonists would know that there is no justification for causing others to suffer, when it is well within their power to avoid doing so.