Hmm, most of those are too accurate to argue with. Bad form, Tailsteak. Still, I'll do my best.
Tailsteak wrote:Abortion - All the crap about feminism or religion just muddies the waters. The abortion controversy is about one question and one question only: how we define a human being.
Important though this question is (well, sort of, clearly there are degrees of "personhood" rather than a binary divide) ... I don't think it's actually relevant to abortion. Everyone agrees that their friends and children count as people, and by analogy all others have to count as people too (the Catholics have always been good at this your-neighbour-is-everyone stuff, fighting slavery and so on even when they're busy being terrible at every other aspect of their jobs.)
We can't formalize it, because formalizing morality is Very Hard, but the day after AI (or ems) pass the Turing Test they'll make human friends and there'll be a huge outcry if/when they're treated like, well, computer programs.
But this is incredibly inconvenient.
As you note, there are situations when we
genuinely should go to war; and even more situations when we just kind of want to because we
can. So we declare that the other side are the bad guys, savages who it's OK to kill. This isn't accurate, but I'm not even sure it's wrong - if we're going to war anyway, isn't it better to avoid the moral damage to your citizens?
Similarly, it's
inevitable that in an economic system like ours - the one that just sort of
emerges from baseline human assumptions about fairness and reciprocity, and thus the only kind that will survive you damaging part of it - there will inevitably be rich people and poor people. It isn't even fair; being poor just makes you poorer and being rich just makes you richer unless you're really (un)lucky. But we can't or won't change that safely, so we come up with just-so stories where the poor are inferior in some way and everything is fair; or it's all the fault of an evil conspiracy of evil people.
It's the only way to stay sane.
Same with children and their parents. Same with farm animals. Same with transsexuals, who we value slightly less than clear-cut bathroom signs but are now kicking up such a fuss that it's easier to humour the SJWs instead. Same with semi-feudal caste systems like the US is still recovering from, managing division of labour unfairly because if there isn't enough profit to go around. Same with experimenting on chimpanzees. Same with homosexuality - ever notice how people argue from "we need traditional marriage" to "gay people are evil liars trying to corrupt us", when the only
link is that if we need traditional marriage we need to screw over gays to get it?
And it's the same with abortion. It
is about feminism. Children are simply too inconvenient to equality
not to be targets. (Hopefully contraception will prove more effective long-term than infanticide, since you can improve your contraception techniques over time.)
Tailsteak wrote:We Christians believe that anyone who isn't a Christian is going to Hell forever. Think about that. That's more than fifty percent of the population of the planet, going to eternal torment, not because they were necessarily any worse than their fellow man, but just for betting on the wrong horse.
Ah ... not
all Christians believe that. They pretty much all believe Christianity has the
best chance of getting people into heaven, but it isn't 100% effective and there's no reason to believe other systems are 100% ineffective. Most obviously, there's Judaism.
EDIT: Oh, and it doesn't take a psychopath to torture. Can't believe I forgot that one.
Have you never heard of the Milgram experiments? One of the most famous results in psychology. Psychologically "normal" people won't be
happy about it, but give them a stern look and they'll torture people to death just fine.
I'm not sure what it takes to ask the kind of questions that the victim won't just agree with to make you stop, though. Some sort of training? Police can be coached not to accept confessions that don't include information on the crime that wasn't released to the press, right? But obviously you can't do that to mere
suspects ...