The axioms of Euclidian geometry do not derive from an assumption of truth. In fact there are several kinds of non-Euclidian geometry which explore what happens when one of those axioms is untrue. But I don’t think one can call Euclidian geometry incoherent.

Groundedness is a continuum. Objective truth is one end of the continuum. Preference is fleeting – near the opposite end. Treating the continuum as a binary choice, and asserting that anything not grounded in objective truth must be preference, is a fallacy.

There are lots of guidelines useful for making choices that attempt, more or less successfully, to be grounded without being tied to some gold-standard reality.

For example, “seek the greatest good for the greatest number” is not fully objective; it does not leave much room for personal preference; it is, nonetheless, a morally meaningful rule for deciding actions (though dangerous if used alone). It does not even directly invoke the preferences of the humans it’s seeking the good of, since “good” is presumably longer-term than momentary desire to yell at your kid or eat that third dessert.

I’ve answered your first sentence, and your third. Your second sentence – if you define “moral” as requiring 100% objective truth, then I quite agree with it. Recognizing that all decision-making is inherently dependent on both context and unreliable thinking is preferable to the illusion that decisions can be made from some kind of universal truth. Attempting to discern 100% reliable truth will fail, and those who try tends to fall back on accepting received wisdom, which is a very flawed – unreliable and dangerous – basis for making weighty decisions.

Of course, making weighty decisions from a non-universal basis is also dangerous. That’s why they are weighty. But a person who recognizes their own unreliability may be convinced to make a different decision. A person who believes their decisions come from the moral center of the universe will bulldoze ahead doing whatever sometimes-hideous thing their belief system tells them to.

Perhaps we misunderstand each other.

I thought you were saying that moral anti-realism is a bad thing. If you were not saying that, then I wasn’t talking to you.

I did have to google “moral anti-realism,” and as far as I can tell, it involves taking the position that there is no absolute morality. If you were not objecting to that position, then you can ignore what I said.

I did not have to google the opinions I expressed; I believe them, strongly enough to be interested in talking about it.

If talking about belief systems and morality in the abstract is experienced as shitting on a person, then that person is too identified with their belief system for me to be able to discuss with.

I hope you’re feeling better soon. My version of that same thing is still.. visiting after a week and a half.

Thanks. I’m grouchy, but recovering.

Good luck with yours – I have finally resorted to hot toddies (okay, tiny little hot toddies in lovely Japanese tea cups but it does help.)

Half-cocked, emotionally unstable and sleep deprived. I think her decision making skills were not at peak efficiency.

Her `plan`was `talk to him. If he doesn’t agree, try to guilt him, if that doesn’t work then threaten him and twist his arm.

I feel like you view the world in a fairly simple manner. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean that in terms of morality and what qualifies as ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ Is Allison good or evil? Personally, I’d say she’s fairly solidly net good. She saves/saved lives, she doesn’t use her power for selfish reasons (most of the time, at least no more than any normal person would if given the powers of a god), and she isn’t a murderer. Were her actions against Max less heroic than she normally is? Sure, I’d say so to a point… Except she also saved countless lives (as established in the comic) with her actions, and depending on who you ask, the fact Max was willfully not helping already when he could was a more evil and morally unjustifiable act.

Do you consider Allison evil because she did something morally grey? Then everyone on Earth is evil. Nobody is all good or all bad, and seeing the world from that point of view is simplistic and I would say harmful.

“I feel like you view the world in a fairly simple manner. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean that in terms of morality and what qualifies as ‘good’ or ‘evil.'”

No, I just consider utilitarianism to be an evil philosophy in general, with historical basis to back up my belief about this. It’s hardly ‘simple’ in why I think this way. Although I do think, as a general rule, that if you hurt an innocent person, that is a pretty clear indication of doing an evil act. And no good intentions can excuse the fact that you did the evil act, because you need to look at the act from the perspective of the VICTIM of that act.

If you maim a child in order to save ten other children, does that make your act no longer evil? The child you maimed isn’t going to be thinking ‘well you did it for a good reason – so you’re a good person.’ Unless the child is the most forgiving saintly being to exist on the planet.

If you rob a bank and wind up shooting a guard in order to get money to feed your starving family, do you seriously think that your family needing money for food is going to be of ANY consolation to the guard’s family?

“Personally, I’d say she’s fairly solidly net good.”

Again, this is a utilitarian mindset, which has been used by SO many fascist governments to justify atrocities in the name of a net good. It’s even been used by some democratic governments for the same reason, like Japanese internment camps during WW2.

Good intentions. So many bad things happen because of ‘good intentions’ – as if people have any clue about what is objectively good vs subjectively good, or have some sort of precognition to prevent against the law of unintended consequences.

“Do you consider Allison evil because she did something morally grey? ”

I don’t consider what Alison did to be morally gray. She did something morally wrong. Threatening to kill someone and using violence to force them when they are innocent of any wrongdoing is WRONG. Telling them you can and will do it again if you want to, and telling them no one can stop you because you’re stronger than they are is WRONG. And yeah, that’s evil.

“Then everyone on Earth is evil.”

Everyone on Earth does not go around physically harming and threatening other people who are completely innocent. Your statement is flawed.

“Nobody is all good or all bad, and seeing the world from that point of view is simplistic and I would say harmful.”

I find your statement that you can measure value of life and value of freedom, excuse good intentions for bad acts, and moral equivalency between not wanting to do something good and actively doing something bad to be far more harmful, not only to the world in the present and future, but to what’s already happened in the past, multiple times.

“Of course you don’t. The fact that people can go one way or the other on it fairly easily is what makes it morally gray regardless of your personal opinion on it.”

No, I don’t consider what she did to be morally grey because there’s no ‘partial victimization’ of Max here. I’m looking at this from the perspective of the victim, while you’re totally disregarding the victim. No offense, but what you’re arguing is analagous to someone saying that a man who rapes a woman was in a morally grey area because he genuinely thought she was wanting sex because of how she was dressed, or because she was getting frisky, and that the ‘no’ at the end was not a big enough deal to mitigate the fact that the man wanted sex. It’s morally grey to the man. It’s not morally grey to the woman.

He was asking for it (ie, being physically forced) because he’s a prick.
She was asking for it (ie, being physically forced because she’s a slut.
See the similarity?

“What makes Max innocent?”

Wow, you have to prove your innocence now? None of that stupid innocent until proven guilty stuff? How about this…. What makes Max guilty?

What makes Max innocent? The fact that he hasnt done anything to Alison, or to anyone, to make him worthy of being physically violated or accosted. That’s what makes him innocent.

“Again your own personal morality isn’t enforced on everyone, and that’s exactly why moral absolutism doesn’t work.”

What makes you innocent that someone shouldn’t come to your house and beat you up? Are you doing enough to help your fellow man? Are you doing enough to help your fellow man based on the subjective view of the person who would be beating you up?

“I consider Max to be anything but innocent, he had the capacity and opportunity to save countless lives with no real effort on his part, and actively choosing not to do so”

This concept is TERRIFYING. The idea that you think you have the right to force someone to DO something else. That you equate being able to force someone to do something good to forcing someone to NOT do something bad shows a fundamental disconnect with human rights.

“(regardless of the fact it was out of spite on top of that) I consider morally unjust. You don’t, and that’s where we differ and why we’ll never agree on this.”

You should be very happy that I don’t consider it morally just to force someone to do something because I personally feel they could be doing something beneficial to others. Even with the limited power I’ve had in real life that would be frighteningly easy to abuse, I was held, both morally and legally and professionally, to a set of rules of ethics in which personal liberties comes first and foremost, and my own personal beliefs on what you should do do not factor into it.

If I had power akin to Alison, you should justifiably hope I would die before I’d decide that maybe I should be forcing YOU or someone you love to do something against their will, by physical force, because I think it would be beneficial to others, based on nothing but my personal belief – whether it works out for my belief or not.

“Allison didn’t want to push Max the way she did, clearly.”

You seem to have selective amnesia as to what Alison did or did not want to do. She spent a few minutes trying to convince him, insulted him, minimized his legitimate worries (which turned out to be justified based on how Alison acted IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS), then threatened him, then physically assaulted him to make him do what she wanted.

Then afterwards, she excused what she did simply because ‘she was stronger than he was’ and that she would do it again if she wanted to, leaving Max with a permanent sense of dread about the next time the psychopathic tyrant superhuman who cannot be stopped by anyone chooses to use him for her own means again.

“The past several pages have been following her regretting it. She felt it was necessary because he wouldn’t help otherwise.”

Yeah that five minutes of ‘do this, you cowardly idiot – you must be altruistic because I say you should be’ was really convincing.

So anyway when was the last time you donated blood, and why havent you done it more often?

“Similarly, Max’s situation isn’t as simple as you make it out to be.
There’s a world of difference between not having the time/money/intellect to learn to become a doctor and so opting to do something else, and already being a doctor and choosing not to save a life when given the opportunity.”

The doctors should keep Feral strapped in to train doctors on how a human circulatory system, nervous system, and how the brain works while still functioning, which would be a lot more helpful for the medical community than working on cadavers. After all, it will advance medical science by decades, if not more, and train thousands of doctors in a way that computer programs and cadavers never would. Plus it might even help them figure out how superpowers work in ways that they have not figured yet. Maybe even giving Feral’s ability to heal to the entire planet. And all it requires is keeping her in torture. It’s for the greater good, man!

/sarcasm..

There is a very simple way to look at this: did Alison commit criminal acts? She threatened, assaulted and kidnapped Max. Yes, she is a criminal and should be treated as such. Is she a threat to society as a whole and should be thus eliminated? I’m leaning towards yes. If she does this again, it’s a definite yes. Notice that morality, and the terms good and evil were not used.

And, you know what? That’s fine. Still less than I would like, but it seems to me like a more or less reasonable middle ground. When are we going to get to the “Treating Alison like a criminal” part of the story?

“Lawful Good does not necessarily equal Lawful Stupid”
– Walter Slovotsky

Only if you have a good GM.

I guess the point is not the conflict, but the break of trust that follows the conflict. While evil is fondamentally individualistic, good relays on mutual trust. Both evil people and good people can coperate, but with different modality: evil people cooperate when it is convenient, and they betray each other the moment cooperation is no longer convenient. Good persons cooperate on the basisi of mutual trust: i will help you even when you are not in condition to help me, because i know that in the future you ll do the same for me, because we are both good. But once a conflict erupts, the good people will think each other evil, and refuse to cooperate even if a common goal emerges.
To make a real life example: two mafia boss can have a bloody gang war between them, but later coopaerate for the common goal of getting control of a territory (and inevitably betray each other later); would an hard policeman and a political anarchist, after hurting each other in the past, ,maybe during a political manifestation, be able to set they difference apart and make a common front for stopping the mafia bosses to take control of their cities?

Oh, nothing that isn’t socially acceptable. He is represented as a selfish person that has no concept of the prejudice that he has. The workers for his family for one. He shows that he has little caring for another persons plight and sees his selfishness as his given right.

Those are things he believes, not things he has done.

He has broken the law by not registering that he is a person with powers (forget the term) after he discovered that his mom lied and made an exception for him and hid him

Cite? In response to the question of why Alison didn’t know about Max’s anomaly, Page 84 of this issue says that Max’s mother “… pulled some strings at the DBRD.” It neither states that Max was not registered, nor that it was a crime, even if he isn’t. Also, I just re-read Issue 4, which contains the origin story, and it doesn’t mention anything in there about registration, either. So where are you even getting this from?

… Hiring illegals is another…

That’s something his parents did; what did Max do?

Your list appears to consist of things that Max believes in, but has not been shown to have acted on, something that he has not done personally, and one thing that, as far as I know, you just made up. For this, “bad things” should happen to him?

True, His parents hired the illegals. He is aware that they are illegal or suspects that they are…

Do we know that, though? I mean, I’d have to go back and check but, if it isn’t explicitly stated that Max knows that the workers are illegals, then we don’t even know that they actually are illegals. I can personally verify that illegals aren’t the only people who allow themselves to get paid under the table, and forfeit their ability to negotiate for better wages/working conditions. It is certainly most likely that they are, but it seems within Max’s character to not examine such things very closely: I get the sense that he didn’t know, and wasn’t interested in finding out.

For the record, I have not stipulated that Max is a good person. I don’t know that he is a good person… I don’t particularly think that he is a good person; he may well be as big a prick as everyone says he is. But, as I’ve said before, quoting the great American philosopher Simon Phoenix, you can’t take away people’s right to be assholes.

I don’t believe in Karma, and neither do I self-identify as a utilitarian, so I’m not a proponent of the “It’s okay if Alison commits a ‘little’ atrocity*, if it helps enough people” point of view. I would like to see Alison be subject to consequences which exceed the self-flagellation that we’ve seen to this point. And I get the sense that, to some of the readers who disagree with me, they see no difference between “more than this” and a never-ending Humiliation Conga.

*And, again, within the context of this story arc, it seems like a ‘little’ atrocity is one that happens to somebody else.

Max explicitly states that the gardeners are illegal:

Ah, so. Are you of the opinion, then, that what Alison did to him was justice/proportionate retribution?

He actually didn’t refuse to help them. He refused to help Alison, and frankly I would to. Alison didn’t try to bargain, she didn’t try to appeal to him. She didn’t try anything. She made demands of someone she had already aggravated that day, and then jumped straight to violence because that’s the only thing she knows how to do in life.

By that logic, you’re evil because you’re spending time reading this webcomic when you could be using the same time to help find a vaccine for Zika virus.

You’re claiming that Max was evil merely for not helping people. By that definition, any time you’re not working to help people, you’re doing evil. You’re not actively doing good while you’re reading this comic, therefore by the logic you’ve been using to call Max evil you must be evil as well. There’s something you could be doing to help with people with Zika, or malaria, or cancer, or whatever.

Is this a reasonable position to take? Absolutely not. That’s the entire problem: you’re effectively making everyone evil, and, to paraphrase Syndrome, when everyone’s evil, no one is.

At what level of personal cost does it become acceptable for someone to not help without becoming evil?

Yep, he was such a prick for refusing aid to the people who would have put him in an internment camp, had they known what he was.

I seem to recall that when the biodynamic phenomenon became public knowledge the president ordered all biodynamics to turn themselves over to military custody.

Millions of people are still going to die of disease, starvation, war, etc. Is Alison evil because she’s not trying to do anything about any of those?

Millions of people die every day from all sorts of things, that does not justify tyranny.

“Do you at least agree that if you are alone with someone who is choking to death, and you don’t do anything to help them, that makes you a prick?”

Yes. That would make me a prick.

Let me ask you a counter-question: If you kidnap a person, threaten to break their arm, force them to do something for you and then tell them that you will do it again if you feel like it does that make you a danger to society?

So paragraph one…well maybe, fine. But I don’t have the energy to go into the constitutional law that mitigates against the legality of what you’re suggesting in the rest of that post.

How many times is it acceptable to torture a suspect and fail to yield useful information? What’s the acceptable frequency rate for torturing the wrong suspect?

Goddamnit my reply got eaten.

Ok. Take 2.

Tl;dr. there is no definite number above zero and even than the circumstances would need to be, imo, of the LIKELY IMMEDIATE DEATH variety with a stern emphasis on “no matter what this is illegal as hell.”

Whatever else we have to not be a society that tortures irrespective of why -tho’ it’s totally too late for that. Haw haw -GWB.

That said, the obvious retort of “how many people would you let die before you’d torture someone obviously cuplable” bears out for being the other side of the coin.

There are no easy answers, but those are damn important questions!

And I think it says a lot about the quality of the writing that readers can be so split on that issue, but regardless.

The main unforgivable sin which folks (like you I think, apologies if that’s an unfair assumption) seem to not get past is: Alison imposed her will upon a person who had not himself committed a sin. She forced him to do something he didn’t want to, and that is not ok.

So, my analogy tries to put myself in a roughly analogous situation. A person I love is suffering (or, a great evil is happening). A person has the means to end that suffering. He refuses to do so for no reason I can understand as ‘good enough.’ I can, by physical force, bring about the outcome I want at the expense of his volition. Would you push the guy down and take his keys in order to save your mom? Or would you accept that he is an autonomous human who gets to make his own decisions about the resources he owns and watch your mom choke to death?

But you would resort to violence eventually, yes?

The point I’m trying to make here is that the use of violence to deprive an innocent person of their own volition is USUALLY, but NOT ALWAYS, the wrong choice. Agreed? It’s the specifics of Alison’s situation, however you characterize them, that lead to your disapproval, not the absolute fact that she did an act like this? In another situation where you were convinced she had no choice, this would be acceptable?

You said “Alison imposed her will upon a person who had not himself committed a sin. She forced him to do something he didn’t want to, and that is not ok.”

This is a very absolutist position. Suppose I were to force you, by threat of yelling, to play the piano when you didn’t want to? Is this equivalent to forcing you to rob a bank under threat of detonating the device around your neck?

Suppose I were an employer and I forced you, through threat of ending your health insurance, to exercise and lose 50 pounds, even though you really really don’t want to. Is this equivalent (forgive me here) to forcing you, through threat of cutting your throat, into a rape?

I submit that there are levels of coercion, and levels of damage caused by such coercion. I further submit the the damage to Max that Allison caused was not that much, and the coercion she inflicted was not that severe.

You are correct, I put my poor reading comprehension down to overwork and overtired; I stand corrected as to your intent. 🙂