(urth) All is Shadow and dust

Chris rasputin_ at hotmail.com
Sat Apr 2 17:08:47 PST 2005


To summarize before trying to answer, what I take it you're asking is 
(shifting the focus from Severian to the Hieros, since on this view Severian 
is just a tool of the Hieros) whether the Hieros, as higher beings, are 
above judgment with regard to their plans for Urth. (Although to be honest 
I'm not sure that the Hieros plan for things to be this way, or if they 
simply accept it as an inevitability and willingly play their roles).

Following Aquinas, God is beyond human judgment and the Hieros could be 
themselves just tools of God, or else beings who operate, like God, in a 
sphere where our judgments are not qualified to reach. Theologically 
speaking once you've taken this first move, of allowing that Sev is really a 
tool of a higher power with no choice in the matter, you've mooted the whole 
question before you begin; this way of looking at Sev is not a perspective 
which allows us to *ask* ethical questions in the first place.

To move things one step down and more safely answer the direct queries here:
Personally I think rights do follow a continuum scale to an extent, and I 
think this accords *generally* with our intuitions in how we ought to deal 
with animals and other people in a variety of circumstances. It's certainly 
arguable, though, so I'm not going to claim my opinion is obviously or 
self-evidently true.

What I can say is that thinking of rights along a continuum scale do not 
automatically authorize the move you suggest. On a simplistic level, we can 
imagine a limited continuum scale on which "rational beings" form one 
endpoint, and insenate matter (rocks, let's say) the other; by this scale 
the Hieros would stand on an equal level with humans, cacogens, etc. And if 
you don't like rationality as an endpoint, others are imaginable ("moral 
agents" perhaps).

But this is a tricky question because it is very easy to slip back toward 
the theological standpoint, wholly or partially. For example we could 
imagine the Hieros having "super-rational powers", etc. To this end just 
remember that our ethical judgments are bound to *our* way of thinking, what 
we call rationality, and we can judge things by no other standard. What I am 
calling the "theological move" is not a way of saying that we *can't* judge 
godly or super-rational beings on our own terms - we can - but it is a 
normative claim that we *ought not* do so.

And, yes, if we make such a move then we will end up exempting Severian from 
judgment; this was one of my original points in the post about judging 
Severian. But if so we should be aware that this is what we are doing, and 
try to reach an understanding of why we're doing it, how we got to this 
point of view.

>That there's some excellent questions.  To counter-query: Do you feel that 
>rights and the ontological status of beings which produces
>those rights should be treated as being binary, or as falling on a 
>continuum (ex. apparently fundamentalist Christian theology
>in which animals and the enviroment have absolutely no rights, and humans 
>can exploit them freely for any purpose as much as
>they like., or ex. pro-abortion people who consider the mother to have more 
>rights than the fetus.).
>If you opt
>for the latter, then the H's who occupy a higher, realer plane of reality 
>have justification for sacrificing so many
>to their inscrutable projects. if the former, then they are merely 
>commiting murder, even if the ends are themselves laudable.
>
>A corpse can change nothing, in any final accounting.  Do people trapped on 
>a doomed dying planet have a chance to matter?
>Do people only matter in that they matter?
>
>~Maru





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