Recent content by Brain

capefeather, your argument still strikes me as a non sequitur. You do not need to posit the existence of an agreeable morality to seek one, and claiming that morality is objective prior to finding the precise framework by which it is objective is putting the cart before the horse. Let me put it...

I am confused. This is allowed regardless of whether morality is objective or not. You only need to understand what moral statements mean. Morality is a strong opinion on what people should or shouldn't do. It is obviously in any moral agent's best interests that every other moral agent thinks...

Tear gas is not transparent. You have one target and the shooter has dozens. Some people will try to run for it, getting into your line of sight in unpredictable ways. You also can't shoot from anywhere that's affected by the gas unless you happen to have a mask handy, because that shit burns...

The shooter set off tear gas grenades before he started shooting. I hope you're not suggesting people try to shoot through smoke in a crowded, panicked theater because that's pretty fucking irresponsible.

Legislating against polygamy would imply that either every single instance of polygamy is morally wrong (although it is quite possible for healthy polygamous relationships to exist), *or* that polygamy is somehow so attractive that allowing it would open the floodgates to a widespread cultural...

Which church? All religions have their own conception of marriage. Unless for some reason the word "marriage" ought to be reserved for mainstream religions exclusively, nothing stops anyone from making up their own religion which allows gay people to marry. Opportunistic religions or sects of...

That makes no sense. The Apple II was released in 1977. The first version of Windows was released in 1985. You should rather point out that the Apple II was designed and built by Steve Wozniak, not Steve Jobs. Jobs never really did anything on the engineering side, he was more interested in...

My actual definition does not use "and". It uses "or", which is as generous as it gets. That embryos can't even pass such a generous definition is quite telling. It might be unclear to me the "exact" point in time the clump becomes a human. But it is extremely clear to me that this point is...

Yes. Then I guess we don't have a right to get an appendicitis treated either. What about pulling teeth? Can't do that safely without tools either. Now, what about a fetus? The life of a fetus is dependent on an outside factor: the support of the mother's body. So that can't be a "right". But...

Potential to be something does not equal being that thing. If someone destroyed the block of marble the Venus de Milo was carved in, would they be guilty of a crime against art? Of course not. The sculpture was not done yet. Similarly, a fetus has the potential to eventually become a human...

I skipped two or three questions. I find that the latter questions sort of assume that the previous questions were answered in a matter beneficial to his argument, and they are increasingly lunatic as a result. Well, at what point do you think that a human being, with human rights, comes into...

Works for me (GIMP 2.6.10), regardless of whether I right click in the selection, outside the selection or use the global Edit menu. Maybe it's poor Windows support, though that'd be kind of weird. You can try this, though: right click, select, border, set an appropriate width, then use the fill...

There may be ways to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and that would obviously be a good thing, but unwanted pregnancies will happen anyway, and you have to figure out what to do about them. If, *hypothetically*, we could objectively show that a fetus is only human after three months...

Because not knowing where a threshold is exactly does not mean we can set it to a value that's obviously incorrect. Consider the concept of a "large tomato" for example. You can pick a tomato and tell yourself that okay, that's a normal tomato. And you can pick some other tomato and tell...

I am not sure what you are asking. I wanted to explain that conception itself was not a good threshold, and to illustrate the point I deliberately chose a time span so short that I could be absolutely certain there is no value at all in the embryo. I would say abortion is fine much later than...