Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster
I don't have your post to reread; all I have is what Noah quoted, and that part didn't say anything about self-preservation.
My reply to Noah on page 1, which took about half-an-hour to an hour to do (IIRC), details my point of view. I'd appreciate not having to spend an hour redoing it.
quote:
Besides, brushing your teeth isn't strictly necessary for self-preservation. It's necessary for a certain quality of life that I'm sure you deem appropriate. But did you ask all the organisms you killed whether they agree? It really sounds like you're making this up as you go along.
With regard to brushing your teeth, let me break it down for you.
There are a gazillion different organisms, of a zillion different types, living throughout your gastrointestinal tract. You can view your body as a donut, with pale skin on the outer side of the torus, and more fleshy-colored skin on the inside of the torus. The "meat" of the donut is the life-support and food-retrieval system for the hole down the middle, from a biological perspective. Along the inside of the torus, there's a bacterial flora which aids in processing stuff that moves through the donut. The balance of the bacterial flora changes constantly. Anything you eat, or do not eat, will cause the death, and birth, of billions of individual organisms. Brushing your teeth will cause the death, and birth, of millions (at least) of individual organisms, as will not doing so.
In short, at this level, your actions do not make any appreciable difference. You cannot deal with this level and live, because you do not have the faculties required for it, and you do not have the options either, since there is no better option. You'd be stuck in a deadlock on what to do, at all times, and you would die, along with the gazillion organisms in you, and the similarly numerous ones that comprise the whole that is you. Hence, self-preservation cuts through, and says that if you want to live, you're going to have to make some choices to preserve yourself, regardless of the consequences to others.
Brushing your teeth regularly will also allow your body to sustain more life, and for longer, than it otherwise would.
Essentially, what I'm saying, is that if you spend all your time trying to consider the consequences in an infinite regression loop, you're dead. If you try to get as close as you can, you'll die from stress. Either way, there is no content or function to your life, which even a virus, by contrast, has. Hence, self-preservation is applicable.
It applies to the extent that whatever concern you are capable of extending to other lifeforms is an ethical requirement, in my morals, but what you cannot extend, you cannot (reality; kind of an overriding imperative, wouldn't you say?) and what you cannot extend without ending or voiding your own life is under self-preservation.
I take my notion of self-preservation, in part, from nature as an example, but also in the concept of "self". There is a point at which no "self" is possible, and self-preservation also covers maintaining that. It doesn't matter whether the challenge is infinite regression and the victims are bacteria, or whether the challenge is armed assault and the victim is the assailant, or whether the challenge is an attempt to bring the world under a fascist regime and the victims are whoever stand in the way of stopping that (or dying in the attempt).
Self-preservation is not just self-defense with reasonable justification (what is reasonable, when faced with the possible death of another?), but preservation of self, your gestalt, as some might put it.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
|
RE: creepy crawly consent - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread