(urth) What's So Great About Ushas

[Roy C. Lackey]

b sharp wrote:
>Your
>example of a surgeon harvesting organs from a "worthless" bum to save
"great"
>men demonstrates my position quite well, so I'll use it.
>
>Despite your assertion that the surgeon has foresight in this situation you
are wrong.

No, he is not. It was a stipulated condition of his cited example: "Like a
fancy Hierogrammate, you have foresight in this one case, and killing this
hobo will in fact produce greater good." You may not like his example, but
that's a different issue.

>The surgeon is only guessing, making a judgement that the bum is worthless
and that
>the men he saves are great and more worthy of life. The surgeon has no way
to know
>with certainty whether the bum would become a world-saving saint if he had
lived
>another year. Or if one of the great men he saves will become a genocidal
monster
>within a year.  He is gambling with people's lives and dealing out death
based on his
>own limited value judgements. That is why utilitarianism is a bankrupt
basis for morality;
> it involves gambling.  Gambling with other people's lives but relying on
less than perfect
> knowledge and judgement. Yep, the surgeon here is "playing God".
>
>But God (or a god-like omniscient being) is not gambling or making
individual value
>judgements in his/her/its actions.

Wrong. That is exactly what god-like Tzadkiel did; gamble on probabilities:
------------------------------------
      "How is it that Tzadkiel could say my examination was
over, when the aquastors had to fight and die to save me?"
      "The aquastors did not die," Apheta told me. "They live
in you. As for Tzadkiel, he spoke as he did because it was
the truth. He had examined the future and found the
chance high that you would bring a fresh sun to your Urth,
and thus save that strand of your race, so that it might
produce ours in your Briahtic universe. It was on that
examination that everything hinged; it was over, and the
result favorable to you." (URTH, XXII, 160)
-------------------------------------

> God knows exactly what the bum and the great men
>will become within a year and beyond.  He not only knows that, he knows
what the exact
>impact of a death or a life or even the flap of a butterfly's wing will
have on every single
>other living creature on earth, yea the effect it will have on every quark
and every galaxy
>in the universe through eternity. No gambling involved at all.

Maybe so, for the religious minded: It is also irrelevant. This is headed
toward the freewill/predetermination issues I said just a month ago when
this was last debated that I wanted to steer clear of because it leads
nowhere, and ends all reasoned argument. God gets a blank pass on
accountability in this discussion, but that's not what it's about. It is
about whether or not the Hierogrammates get the same blank pass.

-Roy