• 10 Posts
  • 408 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 1st, 2023
  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.works•An ethics professor at Cambridge talks about teaching ethics in 2025
    31·
    6 hours ago

    The humor is based on a seeming contradiction this guy’s students exhibit.

    They apparently simultaneously believe:

    1. in a relativistic moral framework - that morality is a social construct (that can mean other things, too, but morality as a social construct is a very common type of relativistic moral framework)

    2. that their morality is correct and get outraged at disagreements with their moral judgments.

    This isn’t logically inconsistent, but it is kind of funny.

    It isn’t logically inconsistent because, if you believe morality is relative and what is right/wrong for people in other societies is not necessarily right/wrong for people in your society, then assuming that the professor and his student are part of the same or similar societies, they should share the same or similar morality. People in the same society can disagree on who is a part of their society as well as what is moral. Ethics is messy. So, it is not necessarily logically inconsistent to try to hold others to your relativistic moral framework - assuming you believe that it applies to them too since “relative” doesn’t mean “completely individualized”. And, due to globalization, you might reasonably hold a pretty wide range of people to your moral views.

    It is kind of funny because there is a little bit of tension between the rigidity of the ethical beliefs held and the acceptance that ethics are not universal and others may have different moral beliefs that are correct in their cultural context. Basically, to act like your morals are universally correct while believing that your morals are correct for you, but not for everyone, represents a possible contradiction and could be a bit ironic.

    A good example of relativistic morality based on culture/society:

    On the Mongolian steppe, it is seen as good and proper for the old, when they can no longer care for themselves, to walk out on the steppe to be killed by the elements and be scavenged - a “sky burial”. Many in the West would find this unacceptable in their cultural context. In fact, they might say, it is wrong to expect or allow your mom to go sky bury herself in Ohio or say… Cambridge. Instead, they might think you should take her in or put her in a home.

    Now, if your professor said to you “So you don’t think Mongolians expecting their mothers to die in sky burials is wrong, but you believe me expecting my mother to die in a sky burial is wrong in Cambridge? Curious. I am very intelligent.” You could probably assume they are either a Mongolian nomad or don’t understand relatvistic morality.

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•It's that simple
    9·
    2 days ago

    So glad I made the switch to Mint back when the EoL for win10 was announced. It has “just worked” with a bit of research beforehand. I like it way more than win10 - looks better, feels better, runs everything I want it to (except games with kernel level anticheat, but whatever), hardware is under less strain and PC no longer sounds like a jet engine. No regrets at all.

    And, another perk I didn’t hear as much about, it is really easy to automate stuff. For instance, I play CloneHero streaming from my PC on an Nvidia Shield on a controller with a USB dongle plugged into the shield (shield doesn’t do that normally, linux allowed me to connect to the dongle over wifi with a little finagling) and I have it set up to automatically connect to my computer any time it’s plugged in. I also have certain files set to automatically back up to cloud storage with a simple crontab task (automatically repeating tasks are very easy via crontab).

    Mint may not be as fancy as a lot of other distros, but damn if it doesn’t work well.

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mlto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone•Must Post
    17·
    3 days ago

    The first time I saw him with the kid, before the memes started, I literally said out loud to myself, “wtf is he using his kid as a human shield?” It was right after Super Mario Praxis dropped and that was my gut reaction.

    It’s possible he wants to seem like dad of the year, but lots of politicians have wanted that, and they don’t do bring your kid to work day every day. Idk. Maybe it’s a dual-purpose thing, but my money is primarily on human shield

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltoNews@lemmy.world•Louisiana to use nitrogen execution method it bans for cats and dogs
    161·
    3 days ago

    There’s a video somewhere of a documentarian undergoing oxygen deprivation under medical supervision by pumping nitrogen gas into a sealed room while he attempted to solve a simple geometric puzzle (like one for kids, putting the circle in the circular hole, etc). He felt totally fine the entire time but became euphoric and rapidly declined in cognitive ability - to the point where he could no longer solve the puzzle but was very confident that he was doing very well. When he was supplied with oxygen he reflected on the experience and said he had no idea anything was wrong.

    Now I’m not saying there isn’t something I’m missing or don’t understand regarding suicide/execution by nitrogen, but as far as I understand it, any discomfort occurs after you’ve lost consciousness.

    I have a feeling the backlash when states started considering this as an execution method was intended to paint it as less humane than the 3-drug cocktail to propagandize against the death penalty - knowing that if a more humane method were used, the movement against the death penalty would probably lose some supporters. So, they poisoned the well a couple years ago when this conversation first hit the news.

    Now, the real argument against the death penalty is that the state shouldn’t have the ability to kill convicts because what is a capital offence can change for arbitrary reasons and the judicial system will always wrongly convict people. But a more visceral argument is that execution is painful and cruel - so take away the pain and you lose the folks you’ve persuaded using that argument.

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