Judgement of a mutilator

Would you let her babysit your children?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Lets see if people don’t make routine judgement calls about PEOPLE.

Feel free to make your replies public Anitas/Gib.

I wouldn’t let Bill Clinton, George Bush (either one), Hilary Clinton or Laura Bush babysit my children.

IN fact there are vast numbers of people who I do not think should be thrown in prison - don’t draw any conclusions about the list above where I think at least one should be in prison - who I would not leave alone with my children.

Leaving aside mentally ill people, people who have not really dealt with their own abuse as children, people under extreme stress, obnoxious people, people with values I really dislike, strict disciplinarians, boring people

I am quite sure there would still be a decent number of people who I would not want to babysit my children

and yet I would not want to throw these people in jail.

Doesn’t a philosophy based on something like this

leave open only judgments of bad programming.

“You have bad programming, but you are not a bad computer.” or “You have been programmed badly. We are going to update you and load some other programs.”
Or even
“There are certain tasks that your programming makes you an inappropriate computer for.”

I can’t see where moral judgments come in if you think we are computers.

Odd that computers have come to be seen as what brains really are, when brains were here first and are vastly more complicated, but that is another issue.

Exactly we’d judge her unfit as a person because of her actions. Not poignant just practical. judgements of bad programming is nonsense, horrid cultural acts can be produced by fine programming.

I never mentioned jail but judgement calls by other people.

Well, I could equivocate on ‘fine’ as you have on ‘bad’. The point being that the philosophy in the footnotes there does not fit well with saying, for example, that ‘she does not deserve a fair trial.’ If we are computers the concept of deserve does not apply. Garbage in, garbage out. Or, in the other possibility, as you put it above, her fine programming is at fault. This means we may need to judge what she is good at and bad at - at this point in time - but the concept of ‘deserve’ is to add something rather monotheist to the ontology.

OK. and I made it clear I would judge her. And I noticed you did not refer to me in this thread but rather the other two who were disagreeing with you in the other thread.

Wtf why wouldn’t it apply if we were a computer? because I share qualities with a box of chips (specialized computational machinety) doesn’t make the two equal. I don’t have to treat human’s like common laptops because we’re computers, thats insane. A computer programmed to feel pain and have a stream of human consciouness fairness applies even if my laptop doesn’t get it. being a computer doesn’t suggest fairness isn’t important.

I tend to think that comments like “don’t judge” are really more about re-establishing the mean. It is like the advice given to guys about being insulting towards women to pick them up – men who are actually insulting towards women don’t succeed (unless they are very good looking, good looking people succeed in that sort of thing regardless); however, most younger men err on the other side of the equation and are too laudatory towards the object of their affections and it comes off creepy as hell. So the message “be a dick” is propagated not because being a dick is a successful strategy but because the mantra “be a dick” serves to counter a natural inclination towards the other extreme thereby re-establishing the mean.

So when people denounce judgment, it tends to be a polite way of suggesting that the person they are saying it to has lost sight of the mean on that particular issue.

so because humans are computers I have to judge them based on their computational standards, how well their adaptations are working? Not standards of how many other computers they destroy? why? Having human values and being a computer is compatable.

I’m clearly missing something . . .

I’m definitiely missing something. Who are we voting about?

I would word it this way: because you believe humans are computers, judging them in moral ways is inconsistant. It would be strange to say, about a certain computer, that it did not deserve something.

Of course you could judge a computer to be a destroyer of other computers. But again the word ‘deserve’ does not fit.

Seeing others as computers and then as deserving or not deserving does not make sense. All that would matter is if the computer will repeat its damaging actions or not. Or its effective or capable of handling this or that task or not. You would never say a computer does not deserve a fair trial or test. It makes no sense. You might say - that computer will not pass a test or a trial or an evaluation, we should scrap it. But deserve… Remember the context is a woman you think does not deserve a fair trial. A strange thought in and of itself, but even more so when it is aimed at a computer.

Nor does this make sense

What the heck is a bad computer?
Effective or not at this or that task, sure. But, bad?

This may seem nitpicky, but while you reasoned on one level only in terms of ‘making a judgment’ of this woman, I got the impression that moral values, dare I say it, even monotheistic ones were present there. Like she had sinned and deserved punishment - something of no use to a computer - which a fair trial might somehow help her evade. I do not think this is compatible with seeing us as computers. And I suspect it is part of the reason the other people are digging in against your position. The exact meaning of judgment, which can easily be an equivocation may be at least part of your difference with them. They may be responding more to the moral backlog from monotheistic judgments, than this thread frames the issue. (and by the way I am not at all assuming you are monotheistic. Quite the opposite, I would assume you are an atheist. Nevertheless many of us having vestiges of that mind set in our beliefs.)

If the idea of the judgment is to simply determine how we can protect people from what she has done, that is one kind of judgment. But there is another type of judgment, that cannot be aimed at a computer, that it seemed like you were aiming at her (and at Anita).