The Gaming Den

And really, why the hell are people defending this? Why are people defending the idea that there's nothing wrong with choosing a partner who can't give or deny consent for sexual activity? Because for some people the question of whether it's okay to fuck a partner which cannot give or deny consent ...

For me the whole bestiality question (and I can hardly believe I am weighing in on "the bestiality question") is not about harm to the animal or lasting psychological trauma to the dog, the lion, or the moray eel chosen as a bestial paramour. This isn't about the wolves. That is a deflecti...

Because the whole fucking point of mind-affecting powers is to force consent where the victim wouldn't have consented normally. The whole point of not looking like a giant lard ass is because it causes people to consent to sex when they otherwise wouldn't have. Alcohol is good for that, too, I hear...

Ever play Red Rocket?



(And no, for chrissakes, neither have I.)

Already repeated a bunch of times my assertion that most people who claim to be acting on morality are already valuing wellbeing as they understand it. However they define "wellbeing," it's what they want. This is an argument you could fairly dispute, but nobody has actually really bothere...

Morality as a matter of personal taste is probably fairly defined as "moral relativism." Even if it's not moral relativism that you're expressing, there's still something very interesting about comparing, "I prefer other people to be less healthy" with "I like sprinkles on m...

The problem is that there's no good scientific measure of whether it's better to have X than to have Y. There's no universal scale to objectively measure the "goodness" of various things like a lower disease rate, higher education, "happiness", etc. You're right. No branch of sc...

Science will never and can never tell you whether pain is bad, or how bad it is. Pain and suffering are things which occur in our minds, which impact our psychological, emotional, physical, etc. health. There is no human experience so spiritual and ephemeral that it cannot be measured (either in ac...

I don't recall that from the TED talk, but it's been a lot longer since I watched that than it has been since I cracked open the book (which was happening last night). If the best he had to offer was in the TED talk, then you would have completely eviscerated the point he is making, but he says more...

The "wellbeing" thing is a pretty basic and ordinary assertion of "my value wins over yours because it subsumes yours and by working for mine explicitly we end up with both." I got a much stronger sense that this was Harris' point than that wellbeing is intrinsically valuable. He...

There's a couple evil characters that might be fine like a mercenary assassin who is on the another PC's pay roll, but that character could... be neutral. A neutral assassin might almost be better than an evil one, because if you get somebody on the job who really has a personal lust to cause suffe...

Here's the thing. I have no way of evaluating or knowing other peoples' brain states. Yeah, if only we had some way of evaluating what was going on in other people's brains . That technology will always be beyond us, though. Alas. Is it one of those 'Humans are naturally altruistic, I'll wager, so ...

Again, I'd love to hear what these mythical facets are that won't cause a group-breaking confrontation if the Good/Neutral characters find out. I've had characters who have had to be held back from doing unacceptable things by their adventuring party. The most notable example was a woman who would ...

The only criterion I ever have for character motivations/alignment/whatever is that they should have some reason to work with other characters and be part of the story. If they're uncontrollable cannibals who cannot help but run around like Reavers savaging everything that moves, then no, you may no...

The health professionals definition works out for them it is isn't controversial. More or less everybody agrees on what health is, and that they want it. This is not true of moral claims. Millions of people in the world honestly believe that pain and suffering are, in some cases, morally good. And ...

Begin by defining "well-being." "Well-being is being physically healthy free, educated, wealthy, etc." Then all you have to do is demonstrate that those qualities are moral goods. The trick is, you can't appeal to definition again, you actually have to present evidence that thos...

Well, you could say the same thing about defining "health," and yet we have an entire medical establishment dedicated to achieving this nebulously-defined value. We don't have to be able to perfectly define "health" to say that vomiting all the time probably doesn't get us there,...

Xenologer--I agree with the spirit of your argument, but Sam Harris views on ethics are rank hypocrisy and largely bullshit. I can elaborate in another thread if you want, as I just had a really frustrating discussion about this on another site. Actually, that would be really awesome. I haven't got...

I would roll my eyes at anyone who lost their shit at any work of literature, film, or whatever that could, in theory, if its in-game material were warped and extrapolated into a real-life setting, possibly imply something that would make stupid people do things that make me cross or whatever crazy...

TheFlatline wrote:Apparently you missed the first sentence of my post: "Just to be obnoxious".

Oh, I saw it. I just didn't think it truly did justice to how ridiculous that conflation is, and it deserved a little more clarity as to why nobody should lend it credence or take it seriously.

Just to really be obnoxious, I'll point out that, as far as historical morality, we *do* live in a consensual history. Counter-example to the holocaust. Stalin during his reign had 3-4 times as many people murdered in the Soviet Union than in the holocaust. However, he was an ally of the states and...

The Technocracy was supposed to have removed the aether from reality, but reality was already giving results consistent with a world that lacked the aether before that. That's the problem. Which means there must be some sort of objective reality that isn't affected by the conspiratorial efforts of ...

In this scenario you can't go and go research and find out whats going on through testing and analysis, because the universe is basically unreal unless you believe in it. The Technocracy's modus operanti can't be to discover new ideas or applications of physical laws, but to invent these into exist...

I don't understand how you get through life basing your attitude of people you don't fucking know based off of how charming you don't know they are. (...) If you are dressed in a manner that makes me think you're part of a group I associate with then I will have a friendly disposition toward you. I...

If diplomacy means, "I know what to say when attempting to be persuasive," the only useful thing I've done with it as a DM is to have them make a diplomacy roll so that I know how much information to give them about the NPC. It's still preferable that they actually act it out (if they feel...