Good is good and bad is bad (yes morality is really that easy)

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@RealUn

You don’t treat pigs and dogs as humans, so within humanity there must be designation on exactly who is or is not ‘Human’. What does it mean, exactly?

@Ichthus77

You have to turn the question inward. What does it mean to be human? To be fully human is to treat the other as self… to acknowledge the personhood of the other in your thoughts, behaviors, and values. Do you do that? If not, you are behaving inhumanly. You’re not being very personable. If others still treat you as a person, despite your not treating them as persons, does it make you stop and wonder?

@RealUn

What is personhood though?

@Ichthus77

Personhood is a basic awareness of your own being in relation to other persons. The reality of personhood does not change with the level of intelligence.

If someone with the capacity for personhood is not self-aware, someone has not treated them as a person yet.

Makes you wonder how self-awareness or personhood ever kicked off. … and how the capacity got into the material. There must be an eternal personhood who can configure material with said capacity.

The original personhood’s requirement of us (our design) is that we be unconditionally merciful (impassibly compassionate) in their image. Drove Nietzsche absolutely mad.

@Ichthus77

The necessary world is that which exists in every possible world, including the actual world, and contains to the highest possible degree every actual possibility, including personhood.

So considering we are not the highest level of personhood, but/and come from the highest level of personhood, how should we treat lower levels of personhood, since the highest level of personhood allows us to at least exist?

@Zeroeth_Nature

Eros and the striving for distinction are the two things I’ve found which most bring about a state of fullness and lust for life in me. This is not to say that they are rational, of course; just that they are very deeply ingrained in me. The alternative would have to be some kind of death drive. What “matters” is that it’s something to make me either want to maintain myself or to end myself!

@Ichthus77

That hunger (anxiety) for meaning doesn’t make sense (is absurd) if there isn’t anything to satisfy it.

Maybe the death drive is actually a drive to transform into something greater and kill something lesser in ourselves? Maybe you could interpret the cocoon, or shedding of skin, or maturation, or hibernation, or sleep, as a kind of coffin to a lower self that makes the greater self possible? But the coffin of rebirth while biologically alive is… choosing other (no, greater) than … well, a lack of recognition of the image of original personhood in every other, including self.

And if someone has not yet gone through that transformation, how should we relate with them to help them along the way?