From: Mark Waser (mwaser@cox.net)
Date: Sun Jan 11 2004 - 18:50:07 MST
Samantha said> So your position is that all forms of diversity are good just
because they are diverse? Then all forms of utterly painful and
reprehensible conditions would also be part of the good as they are
different from (diverse) relative to even a state of the universe chock full
of diverse "happier" circumstances.
The former is my position but I don't believe that your then follows (Now
let's see if I can clearly explain why . . . . :-)
Either the universe is going to be composed of ALL possible conditions or
it's going to be composed of some subset of all possible conditions.
The case of the universe being composed of ALL possible conditions is
uninteresting and I'm not going to address it because morality really has no
inherent meaning if everything is going to exist anyways.
If the universe is only composed of a subset of all possible conditions AND
is continually moving towards a larger number of more diverse conditions,
then I would argue that in general painful and reprehensible conditions
ALWAYS lead to less of an increase in diversity than do happier
circumstances. Or, in other words, the present value of increased diversity
by including painful and reprehensible conditions is HEAVILY outweighed by a
vastly reduced future value.
<am I making sense?>
Mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:45 MDT