7/3/2026 at 8:18:10 AM
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh...Seriously, this playing with living organisms to augment their capabilities and make them do our bidding is a bit beyond my personal moral threshold. At this point isn't easier to miniaturize a robot cocroach?
by PowerElectronix
7/3/2026 at 8:38:35 AM
It's much easier to plug into something perfected by millions of years of selective pressure.by f6v
7/3/2026 at 9:39:33 AM
It really depends on a person's moral qualms and how deeply they are felt.For instance, different people put different amounts of effort in when a rogue house fly enters a room. Some kill, some catch and release.
Which is easier? It really depends on the person and what they are willing to tolerate.
by npmaker
7/3/2026 at 3:08:17 PM
Most flies I kill, butterflies and wasps I usually guide out. But catching a insect and injecting electronic into it to force it to move where it does not want is kind of a very different thing to me.by lukan
7/3/2026 at 5:03:47 PM
What is , in your moral judgement, the difference between a fly and butterlies and wasps? why kill one but guide out the other?by lmf4lol
7/4/2026 at 7:47:42 AM
Flies bite and butterflies don't? Sorry no tolerance for those who wants to bite me.by codedokode
7/4/2026 at 5:18:09 PM
i never ever had a fly bite me… what sort is that?by lmf4lol
7/4/2026 at 6:51:41 PM
They suck blood like mosquitoes, they intentionally search for humans, fly around and wait for a convenient moment. Maybe we are talking about different kind of flies. So we cover windows with an insect screen (net) in summer.by codedokode
7/4/2026 at 7:12:43 PM
Those?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabanidae
Yeah, those I kill without mercy wherever I see them. And they don't sting like mosquitoes, they bite and suck.
(Sometimes I am with hippi people who don't kill flies etc. - so they are annoyed by them, but don't know what to do besides complaining, so when I then do the killing, they don't really object)
by lukan
7/4/2026 at 7:30:26 PM
This is extra large size fly, we have these insects, but they usually live in the countryside and hunt for cows. Normal size fly is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuscidaeYou might go to countryside or forest to enjoy nature but instead your blood will be enjoyed by plentiful selection of insects of all sizes ranging from tiny Simuliidae to large Tabanidae.
by codedokode
7/3/2026 at 6:10:22 PM
Flies fly on shit and bring that in the house. That is reason for me to not have mercy. They bring harm.Wasps do not bring harm to me, I know how to coexist with them, but if my kids are around, I will also kill them if they seem aggressive. So my ethics are very pragmatic.
by lukan
7/4/2026 at 1:00:50 AM
Killing something because it mistakenly wandered into your periphery isn't exactly what I'd call pragmatic.If our solar system drifts too close to another civilization I don't want to get squashed. That's the maxim. We are the fly. If you don't want something bigger than you to be entirely justified in killing you for no reason, you cannot believe yourself to be entirely justified doing the same.
The golden rule is really hard to beat.
by imustbeevil
7/4/2026 at 2:34:22 AM
"If you don't want something bigger than you to be entirely justified in killing you for no reason, you cannot believe yourself to be entirely justified doing the same."For the reason of it being a danger. And that my energy is spend more effective on other things, than trying to save life that potentially carries diseases and goes straight to any open wound or eyes. So they come on purpose, not by mistake.
If that is no reason to you, you may continue to catch and save flies if that is your thing, but please don't say "no reason" when you mean "no valid reason to you".
by lukan
7/4/2026 at 11:18:27 AM
If you're going to apply the golden rule to amoral objects such as flies, it should also apply to, for instance, bubblegum. You should refrain from chewing bubblegum and blowing bubbles and popping them, because then when a nearby star goes supernova it will spare your life. You are the bubblegum, the star would think, if it had thoughts. Except none of these objects have thoughts, including the fly.You might wonder why I say that with confidence, but I might wonder why you wouldn't say it with confidence. But even if the fly does have thoughts, such as "yum, I smell a dead squirrel", it's not a participant in morality. Why should there be a golden rule about protecting animated things? Does it apply to the entities in Conway's Game of Life? Does it apply to alien flies that aren't based on DNA, but not to robots? What is the purpose of such a rule?
If the idea is self interest and reciprocity, you're essentially saying "if an alien civilization assigns rights to all kinds of crazy things, it will also assign rights to me, even though it doesn't understand what I am. Therefore I will assign rights to all kinds of crazy things too, to set an example!"
The example would go unheeded, though, if the aliens don't understand what you are. But if they do understand what you are, they'll hopefully spare you because they recognize you as having moral ideas. In that case, you'd reduce your risk the most by not appearing crazy.
by card_zero
7/4/2026 at 9:35:23 PM
It's a living thing. It can be understood and lived with harmoniously. That's the job of the stronger, smarter thing to identify. If your bar for ethics is sentience, then fuck trees right? Well no, because you would identify trees as beneficial members of nature.Flies have a role in nature, as decomposers and food/water sources for many other animals. They are a valued participant in Earths ecosystem. Houseflies only exist because we built houses around the decomposing waste that they are biologically wired to seek and consume.
by imustbeevil
7/3/2026 at 12:55:14 PM
I can picture an alien picking me up and making horrible experiments on my body alright, so I understand your worry...by igleria
7/3/2026 at 2:23:07 PM
Very interesting research but can’t help but /feel/ this is abominableby engineer_22
7/3/2026 at 9:41:35 AM
No more beer, wine, bread, or yogurt for you.No mushrooms, no meat, and no vegetables.
by tryagainian
7/3/2026 at 10:33:40 AM
This argument is called reductio ad absurdum. It’s often used by people like you who want to prevent others from trying to be better.by silver_silver
7/3/2026 at 1:10:17 PM
> playing with living organisms to augment their capabilities and make them do our biddingI think the OP was just highlighting that we do this all the time.
I personally feel like cyborg control goes a step beyond selective breeding and it makes me feel icky too. But we need to talk about what the difference is.
by sarchertech
7/3/2026 at 3:08:15 PM
What on earth do you mean? That's a basic form of argument, where you demonstrate that the logic of a proposition leads somewhere ridiculous, or leads to a contradiction.It reminds me of somebody I knew who thought that metaphors are dishonest and should never be used.
by card_zero
7/3/2026 at 10:45:34 PM
Yes if we follow the logic that exploiting an organism is universally unethical it leads to a ridiculous conclusion.Maybe it would be more precise to call it a slippery slope but I’m not sure there’s another name for this kind of reductive argument.
by silver_silver
7/3/2026 at 11:43:58 PM
Yes, "reductive argument" is fair enough, don't want to be reductionist and dismiss the emergent properties of the thing. (What were we talking about again? The ethics of meddling with nature?)by card_zero
7/4/2026 at 1:09:53 AM
Posturing and pedantry like this doesn’t change the fact that the nature of exploitation is more important than its mere existence. I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve with these comments but if it’s to convince me the original argument was made in good faith you should try doing it yourself.by silver_silver
7/4/2026 at 10:20:00 AM
What?I'm not doing those things, I'm making an epistemological point that I think is important, though it's an old one I picked up from reading Gödel, Escher, Bach in the 80s, but I do quite sincerely think that arguments that rely on reductionism are bad and frequently silly. Yet I also think that reductio ad absurdum is a crucial form of critical thought. Reductionism claims "there are no emergent properties when the parts are assembled", whereas reductio ad absurdum says "there's something that your simple rule doesn't account for", so it really is opposed to reductionism, unless it's carried out by misrepresenting the rule as being foolishly simple when it wasn't simple.
This is admittedly something of a sidetrack from the question of exploitation.
In the argument near the top of the thread, the point made is of course that lots of mundane and innocent things are the product of meddling with nature. I can't make sense of the phrase "exploitation is more important than its mere existence", by "its", do you refer to the existence of exploitation? Was that topic raised? I can't find the context. I don't understand what you're saying, but I'm picking up "when exploitation is bad, it's immoral", which is true by definition. But I suppose the unanswered question is why it's bad exploitation to make a cockroach into a robot.
by card_zero
7/4/2026 at 8:58:54 AM
Extremely. It’s only a logical facility when the argument made is fallacious.by tryagainian