The_Orcid:

Lord_Terrible:

You + Grateful Kid = Fuzzy Feeling A

You + Cafe Latte = Fuzzy Feeling B

FFA > FFB

If you want to get rid of your empathy to better satisfy your greed, why not do it in reverse, and get rid of your greed to better satisfy your empathy? Same end result, and you don't have to listen to people nagging you about being a ***.

Of course empathy causes you pain as often as it give you the fuzzies. One scenario is give and take, the other is take without guilt. Without guilt, you may never have the heroic satisfaction your empathy might provide, but you'll have a rather, might I say, pure kind of contentedness in your wicked debauchery.

So basically your retort is that FFA < FFB...

I don't think it's fair duelling grounds concerning FFA and FFB. You define FFA as a "give and take" scenario, ie. you feel about yourself but don't get a latte. FFB should then also be a give and take, in that you get a latte, but a normal (or non-liberated or whatever you may call it) person would also get a side order of guilt. If you can throw away the "give" part of FFB, and not care *** about whipping the child, surely you can ignore the "give" part of the FFA scenario at your whim? Or has the Dark Side such a hold on you that you cannot comprehend the concept of not feeding your greed?

Or rather, in the context of genetics, perhaps your specific makeup doesn't make much room for compassion. I could imagine that happen. I mentioned earlier that if I had to explain to you why whipping thirld world children for latte was a bad thing, then you probably weren't going to understand anyhow. In what I called "" people, the scenario of one person causing grief to another person for personal gain without remorse would spark some kind of resentment.

I don't think people are necessarily just born "", or rather let's call them moral, people. There may be genetically determined predispositions of course, at the end of the spectrum for example you have people suffering from psychopathy. Hell, around 25% or something of corporate middle managers are psychopaths. But I think that, generally, that gut feeling is something people learn, or develop, at some point in their existance.

We can probably all agree that all children are a**holes. They're f****ng horrible to eachother. Observe any schoolyard, or alternately that English TV-programme about some kids that are left in a big-brother like house, free to do whatever they want. I've been a *** too, in fact I remember punching some kid because he stole my mooncart. It wasn't "mine" per se, it was  the kindergarten's, and I wasn't using it at the time of course, but it was mostly the principle of it. I abandoned rulership of the playground fairly quickly after that though. Most people abandon being complete dicks at some point, to varying degrees.

I have noticed a thing about humans. The shittier their existence is, the nicer they are. Whenever there's a hurricane or some other disaster, you always hear from the survivors how they're standing together, helping eachother and pulling through. I have a suspicion that what is needed before a person develops his or her empathy, is to have been through some serious s*** of his own.

Applied to this particular scenario, maybe you'd feel different about it Orcid if some imperialist pig had whipped you to power his latte machine at some point.

Maybe everyone should be forced to power a latte machine with their tears at some point in their upbringing.

Survival of the species.

Only a byproduct.

But what did you think of the evolutionary sense of morality?

The_Orcid:

Easily bearable. Right.

But what if you didn't have to bear any pain at all? How is FFA, whereby you must endure some degree of self-sacrifice better than no sacrifice, and contentedness?

I thought I already explained that. But let me make some random statistics anyway.

Let's say FFA gives you 85% satisfaction, whilst FFB gives 65% satisfaction. Even if the pain and guilt associated with FFA gave you a -10% satisfaction, it would still be higher. That's what I'm getting at. FFA is still better than FFB.

But then you still have issues with FFB. For example, you have the entire world hating you. If you can ignore this, ignore practically all painful associations, then I'd more than likely hesitate to classify you as human.
And you'd probably end up dead anyway (We go out of our way to punish/eliminate overly non-empathic people).

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The only thing worse than beating a dead horse is betting on one.