TychoCelchuuu

Nappi's reasoning sounds pretty right - I think it's TREMENDOUSLY over pessimistic to say that giving birth is bad because someone's life might suck. People overwhelmingly want to live, even if you think their life sucks, and hopefully for most of us, even if bad things happen to our children, we're at least situated in a society where the chances of things going so horribly wrong that the kid wants to die aren't very large at all. No matter how awful you think the world is, you're clearly still alive, and if you don't think it's bad enough to kill yourself then I'm not sure why you'd want to prevent others from living. Leaving aside the other complications that people have brought up, I'd like to introduce one problem with Nappi's line of reasoning which has to do with obligations to future generations, which miffy touched on. If bringing people into existence can't harm them as long as they end up leading reasonably good lives, we seem to be committed to the idea that our descendants a few generations down the line won't have any reason to be mad at us for any environmental damage we've done, or anything else, really. This is because if we make any big decisions as a society one way or another (stop global warming, continue global warming, deplete the ozone layer, keep the ozone layer there, etc.) this is going to have pretty big ripple effects. Specifically, the children who will be born in the future won't be the same in both cases. Different policies will cause different children to be born - people will have sex on different days, choose to have more or less children, meet different people and marry different people, etc. In only a few generations (probably not very many), there are going to be almost no people who can say "my life is worse because of what previous generations did." Why? Because if previous generations had done something different, that person would not exist! They wouldn't have been conceived - their parents wouldn't have met, or they would've had a child at a different time, or whatever. Think about the Holocaust, for instance. If it hadn't happened, I wouldn't exist. My father's family came over here to get away before the Nazis got them. So even though I'm missing a good chunk of my family tree thanks to Hitler, I can't call him up and say "hey, Hitler, you jerk, you've made my life worse!" Because if Hitler hadn't done anything, I would never have existed. Or take my asthma. Maybe I'm asthmatic because when I was born in LA, the pollution was bad. But I can't go back 50 years and tell the people who polluted "hey, you gave me asthma! My life is worse!" Why? Because if history had been different (maybe LA passed a bunch of ordinances, invested in public transit, whatever), it's basically impossible that I would've been born. My parents likely would not have met in LA in the way they did (it would be a totally different city) and even if they did, enough of the specifics would be altered such that I wouldn't have been conceived at the same time, born at the same place, etc. There's no "Tycho without asthma" possibility - it's either Tycho with asthma or no Tycho. So, if Nappi is right to say that "as long as your life is at least not horrendously awful, it's not wrong to bring you into the world," and if certain things we're doing now (like causing global warming) are necessary conditions for the existence of people a few generations down the line (as they almost certainly are) then those people seem like they won't have a leg to stand on to criticize us for fucking anything up, at least insofar as those people want to claim that we've made their lives worse. Because we haven't - we've made their lives POSSIBLE, which at least according to Nappi is good or potentially just not bad. This is called the nonidentity problem and if you have a good solution then you should let a philosophy journal know because you could publish an article or something.

Rodi: Many people would of course choose not to hurt someone for the greater good, but it's harder to get people to agree that it's WRONG to hurt someone for the greater good, especially in cases where the hurt is small and the good is great. Since this topic is about whether it's EVER okay to hurt someone, I take it that a case of "smack someone to save four lives" is a counterexample to one possible response, which is "it is never okay." Well, yes, people do bad things. And people don't just do the worst bad things, like torture, rape, murder, enslaving people, child molestation, cruelty towards animals, and circumventing the DRM on a product they've purchased in order to use it without a constant connection to the Internet. They also do moderately bad things, and slightly bad things. If you're really asking "is it okay to do these bad things? Because people sure as heck do them all the time! I even do them sometimes" then the answer is "no" because just because people do something doesn't make it okay to do. If you want to get people to think about everyday behavior and how they hurt people then that's a noble goal, I guess, but I don't think you're going to cause any amazing revelations in people by getting them to admit that hurting others is wrong. Everyone agrees with that. The problem is that people still do it, not that they pretend that it's okay to do.

Well traditionally all sorts of silly things have been considered immoral, but that doesn't mean they were right about it. The title of the thread isn't "what did people 100 years ago think about the morality of having children," right? Why should we care about what religion thinks, especially if it's an outdated philosophy? Shouldn't we make up our own minds one way or the other?

They added it in the first big patch a few weeks ago.

But what is "spite?" When I think of spite, I think of someone acting from no motive other than to do something that is wrong to someone else, simply BECAUSE it is wrong. So you're just saying that "it is wrong to do something wrong." That's tautological. Okay, sure, but you started this thread for a reason, right? You're asking whether someone ever has a right to hurt someone else? Surely you expected more interesting answers than "no," right? Have you ever heard anyone say anything other than "no?" Why would anyone go for anything other than "obviously not?" I've given some examples, like the marriage case, but you then proceeded to change the question, so that instead of asking whether we can ever have a right to hurt anyone, you've instead asked whether we can have a right to hurt anyone from spite. You've claimed the answer is no, but that strikes me as an empty claim. You're not really saying anything that any sane person could disagree with. We don't have a discussion. Or if you claim the answer is yes, I still think I've provided a counterexample. Well, WHY is the person a jerk? Because they're acting solely out of spite! So this is wrong, sure, but it's well within their rights, is it not? So this seems like a good counterexample to the notion that we can never have a right to act out of spite, which means we can have a right to hurt someone else. But as I mentioned in I think my first post, rights talk is perhaps not what you're looking to get at. I agree that it would be ethically wrong to refuse the marriage solely out of spite. If you do it you are to that degree a bad person. But you still have a right to do it. Your question in the title of the thread and the first post mixes together a lot of things, but two distinct issues are what we have a RIGHT to do and what is RIGHT or WRONG, ethically. Whether we can have a RIGHT to do something that is WRONG is a heated question. Is that what you are asking? Or are you asking a different question? A different question you might be asking is "is it ever RIGHT to hurt someone?" The answer to THAT question is also difficult but I think it's easier in the abstract - the answer is yes, if your reason is good enough, and no, if you have no reason (and are thus acting from spite, etc.).

Surely this doesn't answer the question though. Saying "it's a preservation system" doesn't answer the "is it immoral" question. It only answers the "why do people do it" question. Certainly people do some things that are moral and some things that are immoral. Having children falls into one of these categories, or both, or neither. So what is your opinion on that?

I'm asking you to give a different answer to the question. Your current answer says "it's wrong to hurt people when it's wrong to hurt them," basically. You don't seem to have answered the question of WHEN it's wrong to hurt others. Is it ALWAYS wrong? SOMETIMES wrong? In what circumstances? Etc. Deterrence is another POSSIBLE reason. In reality we don't have ONE justification - people are split. I have spoken with a former chief prosecutor of like Missouri or something (can't remember) and asked him whether he sent people to fry in the electric chair for deterrence, retribution, or both. He said he does not believe that punishing people deters any criminal behavior. He thinks the only reason to punish people, even to execute them, is retribution. Is he wrong? Well, if you aren't, then I misread what you're saying. These aren't great arguments for hurting someone via punishment. Incapacitation isn't great because I specified in my example that the people in question won't commit crime again. Rehabilitation is an argument for hutting someone with punishment only because the hurt is a necessary evil in service of a greater good, and then we're back to square one. I'm looking for a justification for hurting someone JUST TO HURT THEM. This is the only case that can answer your original question, which is "do you have the right to hurt someone?" I take it basically everyone on EARTH would answer "yes" if the question is "is it okay ever to hurt someone for the greater good, including their own greater good." The more interesting question is "do you have a right to hurt someone in other cases" because that's the ones about which there can be dispute. This is really unproductive. You've asked a broad, sweeping question about moral justification and proposed one simple way of solving it. I've given a thought experiment that isolates the relevant variables and argued that your principle gives us the wrong answer in the thought experiment, with the implication that your principle fails in the relevant real life situations that are much more complicated (and realistic, of course). Since you insist on a realistic example rather than a thought experiment, though, how about this: throughout most of history in western civilization, people have married largely for economic reasons and for other reasons that have nothing to do with love. Your parents want you to marry some dude you don't like because your older brother will get to work in the dude's business and eventually take it over when the dude dies. Is it OK for you not to marry the dude? He'll be crushed - he's totally smitten with you. You won't really mind the marriage - all of your siblings, your parents, your friends, etc. are pretty much all married for economic reasons, and that's totally normal. You know you'd have a fine life with this guy, and it would be sweet for your brother's business prospects. You still have the right to refuse marriage, right? Even though you do it just out of spite because you are a jerk and hate this guy. Again, I misread you or something. It doesn't really matter.

You can turn on a setting in the options menu that shows jump paths when you hover over a sector, which lets you plan things out so you never get stranded like you did in your last run.

The original question was whether it was ever okay to hurt someone, physically and/or emotionally, and it seems like you are implying the answer is "yes, definitely." You give examples of when it isn't okay, but I take this to imply that there are examples where it IS okay. A slap isn't alright, but how about a pinch? Can I pinch someone without their permission? What about a poke with my finger? Is it alright for me to poke someone? It seems to me that it's never okay to hurt someone even a little bit unless they agree to it, or it's for their own good, or for someone else's greater good, or something like this. Just straight up physically harming someone strikes me as always wrong. There isn't any "threshold." It's just wrong, period. Emotional harm strikes me as the same. There's no line you can cross, below which it's fine to emotionally harm someone. Unless you have a nobler purpose in mind and the harm is necessary to accomplish that purpose, then it's off the table and impermissible no matter how small the harm is. Just because you won't commit suicide if I insult you doesn't make it okay for me to insult you. Now of course almost nobody walks around physically or emotionally harming others without at least thinking that this is in service of some greater good. But that is my point. There's no threshold under which it's fine to harm people. Someone who walked around harming people saying "well it's okay, I'm only harming them a bit, it's under the threshold" would be a horrendous asshole. I find it odd that the idea that moral systems are different for everyone would be a problem for defining what rights are. Maybe we just need to resolve the confusion. People have all sorts of different ideas of how physics works (does a heavy object fall faster than a light object?) and of how many gods exist (one? zero? twelve?) and so on but that doesn't mean there's no right answer. Couldn't all the different ideas about what sorts of rights people have just be a similar kind of confusion? Some decades ago, most people in America took it for granted that African Americans had basically no moral rights and women had a lot fewer moral rights. Surely they weren't just of a different opinion than us - they were WRONG, right?

Okay, ThunderPeel, you defined maliciousness as doing something out of "spite" but this just pushes the problem back - what is "spite," and can you give a definition of spite that doesn't render "it is wrong to act out of spite" basically tautological? You're misunderstanding the idea behind punishment. There are two classic defenses of putting people in jail - deterrence and retribution. Deterrence, which you mention for some reason, has nothing to do with maliciousness or spite or the conversation at all, really, because it's just an example of "do something wrong in service of the greater good" but I take it you're not really asking about those cases. Unless you ARE asking about those cases, which brings me back to the obvious answer which is YES you have a right to do these sorts of things. Self-defense is the most obvious example. The other defense of putting people in jail is retribution. This is the idea that the world is a better place if people are punished for their crimes. Thus, if someone does something wrong but putting them in jail would not prevent ANY further wrong, by ANYONE, it would STILL be good to put them in jail because they deserve it. Would this be done out of spite? No, probably not, but it sounds like you want to rule out this kind of punishment as being impermissible. It's revenge, but not out of spite. So, is this sort of thing OK? You say it's not spiteful to refuse to marry someone. But in the example I gave, it totally is. So if it's never OK to hurt someone out of spite, should I be forced to marry you? I won't mind the marriage. I'll mostly ignore you. Do we have a shotgun wedding in the offing? Or do I still have the right not to be your betrothed? So I think I've provided at least one counterexample to your principle. I think I have a right not to marry you out of spite. I think it would be wrong to force me to marry you even if I wouldn't mind the marriage. I think I could provide other counterexamples to your principle too, but let's keep this simple for now. The point about punishment has brought up another problem with your principle - it's under-inclusive for your purposes, I think. It seems like you want to rule out retributive punishment, but that is not done out of spite. It is done for retributive purposes ideally by uninterested parties.

Well, now things get confusing, because "maliciously" is a very loaded word. For something to be malicious, at least the way I think about it, you have to intend to harm someone for no reason other to harm them, and that's almost tautologically wrong. Whether you can have a right to do something that is always wrong is a complicated question and turns as much on what you think rights are as it does on the question I think you're asking here, which is whether it's OK to harm someone in certain circumstances. The answer to THAT question is "sometimes," but certainly not maliciously, because malice implies that you are only doing it in order to do something wrong. And it's never right to do something wrong. What you likely have in mind are things like "an eye for an eye" where if someone does something wrong to me I can do something wrong to them in return. If I did this, though, I don't think that would be malicious, or at least not malicious in a bad way - I intend to harm them, but not for no reason other than to harm them. I only intend to harm them as payback. So this is not a question about whether it's OK to harm someone maliciously - it's a question of whether certain actions (harming someone maliciously) provide an opportunity for other certain actions (harming someone retributively). This is a tough question but it's much more specific than the more general "is it ever OK to harm anyone" question. There are as many kinds of harm in the world as there are things you can do to people, so you're never going to answer the general question. For each specific harm, there are questions about whether they can be justified, for example through a principle like "an eye for an eye," but this won't give us a general answer. You might be better served by choosing one of these principles and asking whether they can be justified. For instance, is it OK to send someone to jail for something they've done even if we're almost certain (or even 100% certain) they will never do it again? It harms someone to go to jail, but some people say that criminals DESERVE this harm. If we send someone to jail, I don't think we do it maliciously: we do it because they deserve it. But maybe that is indefensible. Others say that nobody deserves any harm, ever (and thus the only time we're allowed to harm someone is in a case like my refusal to marry or self-defense when some other value trumps the harm we are doing). To answer your more specific question, though, I would say "yes, people have a right to harm others maliciously - I have a right to refuse to marry you solely in order to make you sad, because even though I don't care about whether we're married or not, I DO care that you suffer because you are in love with me." Otherwise we would have to say that I have no right to refuse to marry you as long as I wouldn't mind being married. That strikes me as odd. Another possible place to attack my position would be by arguing that nobody can ever have a right to do something that is wrong, but that is an argument about rights and duties and permissions and so on that I think gets far afield of your topic, as I mentioned above. Also, your statement being qualified with "unless someone is in mortal danger" strikes me as odd. Why would I have a right to maliciously harm someone just because mortal danger is involved? Surely it would be OK for me to harm someone to avert mortal danger, but then I wouldn't be acting maliciously. In fact, I am probably acting permissibly or even virtuously, if harming someone is the only option, right? If I did so not in order to avert mortal danger but just to be a jerk, this doesn't seem to make it OK - I might luck out and cause a good outcome, but I'm still an evil person by maliciously harming someone. I just got lucky that my malice happened to avert mortal danger, accidentally (from my point of view).

Yeah obviously there are circumstances where you have a right to hurt someone emotionally. If someone is in love with you and wants to get married, you can refuse, even if that hurts them emotionally. You have a right to refuse marriage to anyone.

I'm playing Natural Selection 2 as my multiplayer FPS of choice these days.

Ugh that video is a perfect example of people having to add in BASIC FEATURES to this game because Bethesda can't be bothered to do it themselves. Like honestly how can you watch that without realizing that Skyrim should've been like that already. At least the modding community is fantastic enough to make this stuff and do it better than Bethesda ever could.

There's a big difference between "maybe you can argue it's somehow satire, but it just looks immature to me" and "the satire is still male-centric and negative in its depiction of women." I can disagree with the first statement but agree with the second. I take my posts to be disagreeing with the first. I don't think misogyny or male-centricity is immature - it's just misogyny. And either way, it's definitely satire, not just senseless pandering to the male gaze. edit: with respect to your Aeon Flux point - I took the completely nonsexualized policewoman, who isn't in an advertisement so much as she's busy arresting that oversexualized lady who IS in an advertisement, to be exactly the kind of satire we're talking about. The officer is the real woman - no fancy makeup, sensible haircut, non-sexualized pose, normal clothes, not staring invitingly at the viewer, while the perp is the classic "sexy lady trying to sell you something" bullshit. It's the absurd (in the form of oversexualized American media) intruding into the pedestrian (the police officer) which is a hallmark of the entire GTA franchise. The absurd, represented by all the aspects of American culture that GTA satirizes, intrudes into the pedestrian, which is Rockstar's pitch perfect recreation of what American cities feel like. If you think there's zero context to any of the GTA ads and their seductively posed women, I feel like you're just ignoring everything the GTA series has stood for. They take everything toxic and ridiculous in American culture and amplify it, shine a spotlight on it, and turn it into the narrative of t he game, the background noise of the game, the advertisement for the game, and so on, then they wrap it in a cloak of artistry that comes from their amazing art and sound design and so on in order to present a package as slick as anything they are making fun of. Suffusing the parody in the same authenticity that makes the original stuff grab us in the first place keeps the irony from feeling crass or unthinking. Rockstar can do what we can do, just as good or better, so when they make fun of us it's not from a position of jealousy but from a position of bemusement or morbid fascination.

Have you ever PLAYED a GTA game? Those are nothing if not packed to the brim with EVERY kind of tone, from silly to serious to ironic to murderous rampage. There is indeed another silly picture in the ad campaign, though - the woman taking a picture of herself with her not-an-iPhone that I discussed the previous page of this thread.

Rockstar seems to be driving towards mature narratives that move the genre forward and not satire? Those two are not mutually exclusive and Rockstar has doubled down on both, I woudl argue. Their last DLC was called "The Ballad of Gay Tony" and the trailer prominently featured a silly man in his underwar - tell me they aren't trying to be satirical and even downright goofy. Or even just watch the GTA V trailers! In the first one, a truck drives by selling microwaveable burgers with the slogan "Once It Pings, Eat Like Kings." Then a postal delivery truck drives by with the slogan "We Aim Not To Lose It" which is a double pun! There's an ad for Pisswasser in the second trailer, followed by the zany crazy guy who's like "yeah I'll swing by to sign the lease, ignore the dead bodies" and the faux-thug son of the white guy with his silly neck tattoo who says "let's bounce." A jeep drives out of an airplane and a guy jumps off two trains that are crashing into each other and exploding. Hell, Grand Theft Auto is more parody than mature narrative even in the most serious installment, #4. If you want to pretend like Rockstar is just aiming to make Heat in video game form as an excuse for getting mad at the blatant oversexualization in their ads then go ahead, but that oversexualization is, as I have argued earlier in this thread, absolutely tied in to the parody of American media culture that forms perhaps the strongest baseline theme in the GTA games after the hyperviolence and the games' treatment of it. Maybe if every second of every Rockstar game weren't suffused in joke advertisements, joke TV shows, joke radio broadcasts, joke characters, and ridiculous situations, you would have a strong leg to stand on when you argue that their advertisements don't have any satire going on, but I think you're better off with the argument you were making on the previous page of this thread, which is that it's legitimate satire but that this doesn't make it OK. That's a much better argument than saying "Rockstar is just drawing sexy ladies because sex sells."

Looks like the patch to remove the objective marker came out although the rest of the HUD is there. From the comments I learned that there's a mod to stop objects from blinking and a mod to get rid of the minimap among others.

I don't see why not, although with a higher center of gravity they might tumble over more often. Why you would want to get that close to one of them is completely beyond me.

Steam.

It's not like any of the Thumbs denied there was fun to be had in the game - they said the core shooting mechanics were stupendous and praised the stuff like the animal/AI interactions that resulted in crazy stuff happening. Not to single you out, but perhaps to single Caspar out: just because people say bad things about a video game (or about anything) doesn't mean there's nothing good about the game. Even if three people spend half an hour discussing everything they hate about a game, this doesn't mean they hate everything about a game. You don't really need to say "there is still a ton of fun to be had in that game" unless people get the wrong impression from criticism like the kind in this latest episode. If anyone listens to Sean, Chris, and Jake talk about Far Cry 3 and comes away with the impression that there's nothing fun about it, they honestly weren't really listening to the criticism or understanding what was being critiqued. Video games are not undifferentiated masses that must be taken or left as wholes. We can break them up into parts and examine the parts that didn't work. I think when it comes to video game criticism, there are at least two kinds of people. One kind of person wants to know "is it a good game or not?" and this kind of person will listen to people talking about games and try to figure out whether they like the game or not. If they listen to Idle Thumbs 88 they will probably think that the Thumbs don't like Far Cry 3 and think it's not a good game, so then they might post on a forum somewhere and say "hey, I had fun with Far Cry 3" or "Far Cry 3 actually is a great game" or "Congrats Nick" or something. Another kind of person approaches games criticism not from a "is the game good or not" angle but from a "what in this game is good and what in this game isn't good" angle. Those kinds of people will hear this podcast and learn that there's a lot of stuff in Far Cry 3 that the Thumbs don't like, and that all this stuff actually hurts their enjoyment of what they see as fairly indisputably great basic mechanics. This second kind of person will maybe go onto forums and post "I agree with you guys about the UI popups" or "actually I thought those worked pretty well" or "those gun vending machines aren't too awful, in fact they aren't very different from the gun boxes in Far Cry 2." I tend to fall into the second camp more than the first - I don't really care if a game is "good" or "bad" full stop, because that's such a nebulous notion and because I don't know why I should care unless I'm a fanboy or really worried about making sure people call a game "good" rather than "not good." What I am interested in is discussing things in games that work and that don't, and I don't let that discussion get in the way of enjoying a game - I could think that 95% of the features in a game are a total failure, and spend half an hour talking about them, and yet still enjoy the game. Alpha Protocol is one of my favorite games of all time but I could make a list as long as your arm of things it fucked up worse than Far Cry 3 fucked things up. Does that mean it's a bad game? Who fucking cares? So yes, there is a lot of fun to be had in Far Cry 3. I don't think any of the people in the podcast denied that, though, and I'm not sure how that's relevant when it comes to the specific criticisms that the Idle Thumbs episode brought up.

He mentioned the omnipresent "here is your next objective" thing which drives him, surprisingly enough, to his next objective rather than exploration. Maybe he could revisit the game when they release the patch to let you turn that off.

This is Peter Molyneux promising something life changing. There is a 100% chance that whatever it is, it's something fucking stupid.

20 diamonds is way too much money for just an assault rifle, so you're definitely buy an "all you can shoot" subscription.

The way I understood it, they made three distinct criticisms of the gun vending machines. The first is that they hated having to scavenge for leather from 8 different species instead of being able to just BUY leather - why are there gun vending machines in everyone's house selling highly advanced tools of destruction, but literally nobody on the entire island has any leather lying around for sale? Why can you sell leather TO the machines but not get it back OUT of them? They didn't like that, "it is a video game" doesn't really remove the tedium of having to scavenge for things you want to just buy because you don't enjoy the scavenging mechanic, and Far Cry 2 never said "you have to find certain things but you can buy as many guns as you want." The only thing you had to find in Far Cry 2 was currency to buy stuff, and missions would give you enough currency to buy whatever you want if you want to skip the scavenging mechanic. Their second criticism was that it's just bizarre that everyone's house has a vending machine that sells GUNS stocked by some lady on the island, because... why? Is she a supervillain? In Far Cry 2 this made a lot more sense - the country is literally a warzone full of arms dealers. Arms dealers are EVERYWHERE, half your missions are "blow up this arms convoy so that my own arms convoy will be more profitable," and so on. The safe houses themselves are used by the other foreign mercenaries in the country, not just you. It is kind of strange that nobody takes your guns and stuff, but it's much more understandable how a country where convoys of arms dealers drive across the roads constantly would keep safe houses used by foreign mercenaries stocked with guns than it is for why some tropical island has gun vending machines everywhere. Their third criticism, and maybe the one you seem to be the most focused on, is that the gun vending machines ruin the aesthetic. Did you hear how much they gushed about how AMAZING that estate was, only to be ruined by the stupid gun vending machine in the house? Far Cry 2 doesn't suffer from that at all. The safe houses are weapon, ammo, and medicine repositories, and the crates from arms dealers are just a further reminder that the country has gone to shit and is in the middle of a war.