I guess it is time to come back to this.
1) You haven't provided an argument to why something that doesn't feel pain should be irrelevant! Or, for that matter, why things that feel pain should be relevant. See #3.
Burden of proof is on you to show that a rock is in need of moral protection
Wait, hold the phone. Are you seriously claiming that ethical decisions should be completely divorced from their effect on the well-being of the very entities that ethical behavior is supposed to regulate the relationships between? I have also not once specified that pain is the only consideration, it is just the easiest to talk about and describe in examples. I have repeatedly been inclusive of all life experiences that go toward well-being.
2) I actually have given reasons why it is important to have an inclusive definiton of moral worth, even if you reject my axiom. You can these reasons call it a fallacy, but that's not important.
A fallacious argument is not an argument worth addressing.
3) How can you mistreat a rock? Simple, destroy it needlessly, just like anything else. Why is some random chemical or electrical impulse evil, but destroying a rock isn't? Be sure to read the whole post before replying.
Or you could make arguments that are coherent within the medium. As a partial response just to this:
Causality issues calling a pain signal random aside, it is not the electrochemical signal that is evil in itself, but the experience of the creature in which said impulse occurs. That is what is relevant. What is your argument in favor of the intrinsic value of rocks. Your axiom is not actually an axiom. It is a tautology:
Me: You cannot mistreat a rock
You: You can do so by destroying them needlessly
Me: Why is that morally wrong?
You: Because they are being destroyed needlessly
Me: WHY IS DESTROYING A ROCK NEEDLESSLY UNETHICAL?!
You are arguing in a circle. Stop.
But, the Nazis or other racists don't assume other people are like them. They assume they are different, and often make scientific sounding arguments to support that. Note that people are fairly easily convinced by pseudoscience, especially if there are already racist thoughts throughout society (and there are).
That someone will misrepresent an argument to justify something evil does not invalidate the argument. When you argue by counter-example, you are supposed to argue by logically extending the argument to a circumstance that leads to an obviously unethical conclusion. For example, Kantian Deontology requires honesty, because to lie to someone is to use them as a means to your end, and that is wrong. So, you would be required to be honest to the Nazis looking for Jews hiding in your attic when they knock on the door. That is obviously wrong, so Kant breaks down. Committing a strawman of the argument is not a valid way to do this. Claiming that someone else will commit a strawman and do something terrible in so doing, i not an invalidation of an argument's premises or conclusion. It is a fallacy. Get over it.
Moreover, racists dont NEED logic to be racists. Nor have they ever used an argument from permissiveness to progress to a mandate. It has never happened. The Nazi's started sterilizing and killing people from the starting gate, and they used bad science and bad logic to justify it. You are effectively using identical logic to making the claim that teaching evolution is wrong because a strawman of it can be used to justify mass murder.
For a solid pro-choice argument, yes.
For a crime rates or welfare spending argument, no. You could say they make the wrong choice by looking at the numbers. I think I said it to Darth Wong: the problem with making this argument is you put the rights contingent on some bullshit criteria, all you have to do is change those criteria and the justification goes away... and with it, quite plausibly, the right. The arguments you use to lawmakers and courts matter when they are challenged.
It is entirely possible for something to be a good idea for multiple reasons. Both the rights-based argument, and the practicality argument are good reasons to be in favor of permissiveness with regard to abortion, and when applied using consistent logic bolster eachother.
Umm, no. Math isn't empirical.
When you are talking about properties of the universe with it, which is what you are analogizing it to, it most certainly is.
The sine wave does not prescribe the propagation of a standing wave. It is applied to describe said propagation.
The truth value of string theory is not prescribed by its mathematical elegance. The universe may or may not be accurately described by said math.
In the same way, philosophy does not define the universe. The universe exists independently of philosophy. It does not matter how elegant said philosophy is, it does not matter how much you like it. The universe exists, and it exists independently of human reason.
Science describes the universe. It doesn't define it.
That does not even make any sense.
You are claiming that you are attempting to find a logical set of moral rules. Properties of the universe that prescribe moral behavior. You have premises from which a conclusion logically flows (well, you have not demonstrated this. But I am assuming for the sake of argument that something resembling this exists). Just because you have such a set of premises and conclusions does not mean that the universe behaves this way. Your premises could be invalid, and as such your conclusion may not follow from your premises. Alternatively, your logic may not be sound, in which case your premises or conclusions are not true.
How do you check this? You use science. You determine the truth value of your premises by querying the universe
You claim that the universe metaphorically cried when the holocaust happened, and that some ethical system might exist that accurately defines what morality is, that this would be complete, and universal. If this is true, we might expect that some ethical system that does not break down within dilemmas or create situations when applied that run counter to our experience of the moral life might have been developed over the course of the last three thousand years. None has been forthcoming. We might expect that conditions intrinsic to the mind such as sociopathy would not have an effect on moral behavior, or that such conditions would not have a cause grounded in differences in brain structure and functioning. A sociopath would, for example, display a brain anatomy no different from anyone else, and they simply choose to be dicks, because morality has no grounding in anything intrinsic to the mind. Neither of these is true. Sociopathy does affect moral behavior, and it is rooted in differences in brain anatomy and cognition.
Conversely, if morality is grounded in the "Moral Sentiment" as Darwin and Adam Smith put it, and said moral sentiment is a quirk of evolution, grounded solely in the brain, and the result of selection on social organisms, then we would expect to find other things to be true.
We would expect to find that ethical behavior of some sort would be found in other social species. It is. We would expect some form of it (helping someone in distress for example), to be found in very young children prior to socialization and the teaching of moral values. It is. We would expect that moral cognition would take place somewhere other than or in addition to the frontal lobe where abstract reasoning takes place. This is true. We might expect that different ethical values are handled by different parts of the brain. They are. We might expect that philosophical ethical systems break down because these parts of the brain are in a sort of conflict, with the outcome dependent on the strength of relevant stimuli in ethical dilemmas. fMRI shows that this is true. We might expect that aspects of moral behavior and cognition might be affected very strongly by things of particular adaptive importance. For example, we might find neglect of infants to be particularly heinous, or we might extend additional moral courtesy to species we co-evolved with. Both are true. We might find that other species might be able to co-opt out moral cognition directly by mimicking our own infants. This is true.
Lastly, we might expect that driving all of this, is a means by which we can put ourselves into the shoes of others. Theory of mind. The recognition that another being is like ourselves, and we might even expect that their pain, or their joy, their sense of violation or vindication might be shared by us when we observe it. Both of these are true, and the neurons that permit this have been discovered.
Do I need to go on? This is an empirical question. Said empirical question has been answered by hard data.
