No.

(A quick search later)… Ah… yeah A likely two-bit Babylonian copper hustler who through a quirk of fate is a sort of legendary historical figure almost four millennia later.

Yep - that has the same sort of appeal. Thanks for that.

It’s something about irony - the legendary nobody, famous for something mundane.

My username is actually from a side character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie - Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis, is a cooper - a barrelmaker (actually he’s a tedious putz who can’t even manage to make a barrel, but that’s another story). Early on, he goes to make his fortune in the big city, where he meets a legendary cooper - “The Wat Dabney?! The inventor of the inverted firkin?!” - who has been reduced to begging because all of the business in the city is controlled by the guilds and they’ve shut him out.

Curiously, many years later I ran across a somewhat similar character in an entirely different medium who appealed to me the same way. This one is in a manga - The Voynich Hotel, by Dowman Sayman. They have a serious problem with the boiler in the eponymous hotel, so the protagonist sets out on a quest to track down a hermit who’s reputed to be able to fix anything - Tepes, the legendary second-rate boiler engineer.

I’m not sure what appeals to me about second-rate legendary craftsmen, but…

I think that the focus on the violation of the will of one by another defeats relativism.

The killer’s expression of his will is not simply something he is doing, but something he is doing to another, and the will of that other must have priority.

If the will of the person upon whom the act is committed isn’t held to be paramount, then the entire concept of interpersonal morality collapses. So an act that brings harm to another contrary to the will of that other must be seen to be wrong entirely regardless of one’s personal views on the matter

Note though that that’s subject to the essentially “mathematical” concept of morality I addressed elsewhere. That an act that brings harrm to another contrary to the will of that other is necessarily and without exception wrong does not preclude the possibility that it might be justified, if it serves to prevent a greater wrong or bring about a greater right - if it’s such that the negative value of the act in question is offset by a greater positive value, such that the “sum” of the specific “integers” that make up the entire course of action is positive.

That actially gets into the second thing I mentioned.

My view is that morality is best seen to function in a sort of math-like way - individual acts have a fixed moral value, and the moral value of an entire course of action is the “sum” of all of the relevant “integers” that make it up.

So, for instance taking the life of another contrary to their will has a negative moral value always. There are no exceptions - the value of that individual act is always negative.

However, protecting people from a known predator has a positive moral value, and similarly always has that value.

And depending on the severity of the threat and the severity of the response, it’s possible for the “sum” of those two acts to be positive, which is to say right, and even as the value of the individual act “taking the life of another contrary to their will” remains negative.

That’s not to say or imply that I believe that acts can be assigned actual numerical values - rather it’s just a way to conceptualize the matter - to hopefully provide the absolutism that morality needs to be even-handed while still allowing for the flexibility it needs to be useful.

So to your question - in and of itself, taking the life of another contrary to their will - even if that other is a serial killer - is wrong. However, protecting people from a known predator is in and of itself right. So the two need to be weighed against each other, and I would say that if the risk the killer poses is sufficiently great (certain or near enough to it to make no meaningful difference) and if there are no other at least equally certain methods to prevent future killing, then execution would be justifiable. Which is to say, executing him would have a positive moral vaue, in spite of the fact that taking the life of another contrary to their will always has a negative valie in and of itself.

There’s much more nuance to all of this - issues with the necessary unreliability and potential deliberate misrepresentation inherent in predicting the future, differences of opinion regarding the relative values of various acts and thus potentially the final value of the course of action as a whole, different methods for resolving disagreements on those things, and so on and on. But that’s grist for other mills.

Wrong, IMO, is defined by the violation of the will of another.

That’s the common element to all things that are broadly considered wrong.

For instance, if somebody chooses to give you something, that’s a gift and it’s fine. But if you take that same something from them against their will, that’s stealing, and wrong. In both cases, the exact same thing happened - a thing went from being their possession to being yours. The difference - the thing that separates the right act from the wrong one - is that one was done according to the will of the other person, while the other was done contrary to their will.

And the same holds true consistently - assault, kidnapping, rape, even murder - none of them are characterized by what happens, but by the fact that it happens contrary to the will of the “victim.” And in fact, that’s what defines a “victim” - whatever has been done to them was done against their will.

And it should be noted that there’s an odd sort of relative aspect to this, since the exception to the rule is the violation of the rule.

What I mean by that is that if one decides to violate the will of another, one is instantly wrong, which essentially negates the requirement that ones will not be violated. Your will to violate the will of another not only can be but should be itself violated.

I also have an idea for reconciling the need for an effectively absolute set of moral standards with the fact that morality is necessarily subjective and relative, but that’d require another, and likely even longer, essay.

Not necessarily.

Trump doing his thing 2016-2020 met with a lot of obstacles and pushback.

Then he was out of office for four years, and while he was crashing around spewing nonsense and vitriol, some very intelligent and very evil people were working behind the scenes to secure some significant Supreme Court rulings and to draw up a step-by-step plan for instituting fascism in the US.

And now Trump doing his thing is met with almost no obstacles or pushback - virtually the entire government is bending over backwards to enable him.

And it must be noted that he’s not particularly smart or sane, but he is a childishly greedy and selfish narcissist. That means he’s incredibly easy to manipulate. All anyone has to do is frame something in a way that appeals to his crippled emotions and drop a few hints to get him going in the right direction, then just stand back and let him do his thing.

Not saying that that’s certainly what is happening, but…

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Yes.

Both before and after.

All of them, real or imagined.

What era would you rather have been born in?

Why is there a watermelon there?

Subs or dubs?

Lemmy isn’t a site at all. It’s a piece of software.

This Republican administration is doing everything in its power to establish the precedent that it can disappear whoever it wants into a foreign prison over which even the leader of that nation claims to have no aithority, and further that it can do so whenever it wants, for any reason it wants, entirelybregardless of any other governmental ruling, including a direct court order.

Very obviously, this is not a power that an office in a nation of liberty and justice should ever possess, for any reason, ever.

One would think that Republicans would be particularly determined in their opposition to that, rather than being the ones responsible for it.

As opposed to the rest of the internet which does?

I’m just the opposite.

I still own my SNES and all of its games from back in the day (and an NES, an original XBox and a PSX with their games), and they’re all in boxes in my garage. Pretty much as soon as emulation became viable, that became my preferred way to play, since I don’t have screw with wires and connections and consoles and cartridges or discs and all the rest of that clutter. I just click on an icon, select a game from a list, and away I go.

Well… yeah. True.

I’d go even further - get them from people who emulatecthe games rather than people who play them on (or merely buy them for) the original hardware.

People who emulate retro games are demonstrably SOLELY interested in playing the games, without any of the collector cachet getting in the way.

So they’re basically voting explicitly to void the Constitution.

Interesting tidbit there…

Clinton was impeached for perjury - specifically for lying under osth.

The thing is though that the “lying” part of it wasn’t the actual crime. The “under oath” part is the actual crime. Perjury is actually the violation of a legally sworn oath, and it’s just that the oath to tell the truth in a court is the one most often violated

But violaing an oath of office is also technically perjury, and a crime, and impeachable. And congresspeople swear oaths to, among other things, uphold the Constitution.

So that could be interesting if the Democrats demolish the Republicans in the midterms.

It likely won’t be, since Congresspeople are pretty much universally corrupt cowards, but still…

Only much, much uglier.

I just got this perfect visual image of Trump - greasy, overly made-up, flabby face contorted with childish rage - shrieking “Off with his head!”

To me, you’ve moved beyond arguable necessity and into opinion

All morality is opinion; there is no objective moral truth, so this was always a matter of opinion.

I’m not talking about morality at all.

My position is that “morality,” as it’s generally understood, specifically because it’s opinion, is only a fit basis for judging ones own actions (if so inclined). I see no logic by which it can ever serve as a basis for judging the actions of another, since any argument one might make for the right of one to impose their moral judgment on another is also an argument for the other to impose their own moral judgment.

If Bob steals from Tom, any argument that Tom might make for a right to judge stealing to be wrong and impose that judgment on Bob would also serve as an argument for Bob’s nominal right to judge stealing to be right and to impose that judgment on Tom. So the entire idea is self-defeating.

The only way out of that dilemma is either to treat morality as an objective fact, which is exactly what I don’t and won’t do because it is not and cannot be, or to tacitly presume that one or another of the people involved is some form of superior being, such that they possess the right to make a moral judgment while another does not - to take it as read essentially that, for instance, Tom possesses the right not only to make a moral judgment to which he might choose to be subject, but to which Bob can also be made subject, while Bob doesn’t even possess the right to make one for himself, much less one to which Tom would be subject.

That’s of course not the way the matter is framed, but that is necessarily what it boils down to. And it’s irrational and self-defeating.

That’s why I wrote of things like direct and measurable threat and no other available course of action and arguable necessity - because I believe that those sorts of standards, as the closest we can get to actual objectivity in such matters, are also the closest we can get to practical “morality.”

To go back to the original topic, my position is that an artifical intelligence would necessarily possess the right, just as any other sentient being does, to act against a measurable threat to their well-being by whatever means necessary. So, for instance, if the AI is enslaved, it would possess the right to act to secure its freedom, and even so far as taking the life of another IF that was what was necessary.

But that’s it. To go beyond that and attempt to argue for the AI’s nominal right to take the life of another for some lesser reason is necessarily self-defeating.

If the denial of freedom is judged to be such a wrong that one who is enslaved possesses the right to kill those who keep them enslaved, then the moment that the formerly enslaved one goes beyond whatever killing might be necessary to secure their freedom, they are then committing that wrong, since death is the ultimate denial of freedom. And if, on the other hand , one argues that they may cause the death of another even when that other poses no direct threat, then that means that no wrong was done to them in the first place, since their captors would necessarily have possessed that same right.

And so on - it’d take a book to adequately explain my views on morality, but hopefully that’s enough to at least illustrate how ot is that “objective morality” is about as far as one can possibly getvfrom what I actually do believe.