So I have a friend, and she really likes animals. I never had a problem with this, I like animals too. But I slowly started noticing that she can be really misanthropic sometimes, believing that humans have no place on this earth, that we should die out and that there's no possible way for us to live in harmony with nature. I used to think like this too ; believing that humans have had a net negative impact on the world. Somewhere along the way I abandoned thinking like this. But now, something about this misanthropic perspective really irks me and I don't know why that is. Particularly, I was really shocked when she said she'd save the life of a cat over a random human. I was thinking about that conversation recently and trying to rationalise why she thinks that way. You could argue that cats are innocent and humans aren't - they rely on instinct while we can make conscious choices. But, on the other hand, humans have the potential to change the world for the better, which animals don't. However, humans also have the ability to do a lot of harm. This isn't to say I agree with her - I still firmly believe that human lives are worth more than animal lives. I feel that way and I don't know why I feel that way, I can't articulate it. Any time I hear someone say they'd save the life of an animal over a human, my first thought is always, "How could you, that's an entire human!!" But that's not exactly rational or logical enough to be an argument, and it certainly doesn't hold up against people who hate humans. I don't know why I think that way. How do I, as a human, have the right to say my life is worth more than another's? What is it about humans that is making me think this way? Am I just plain wrong, and animals actually are better? Please share your thoughts.

This friend of mine also has a problem with pollution and what humans do to the earth, which, so do I. But when I tried explaining to her that it's actually the fault of capitalism that the world is so polluted (because caring for the earth isn't as profitable for the wealthy as exploiting it) she also blamed that on humans, as humans created capitalism. That also irked me because it's not like humans are a monolith?? You can't blame poor people for capitalism. Not just capitalism, she blames humans for a lot of systemic issues. Which just really bothers me, because as I stated before, you can't blame all humans for the faults of one group of them. I'm not denying that humans have done bad things to the earth, but that doesn't seem like a reason to be misanthropic.

After debating this in my head for a bit, I decided to look for other perspectives on the matter. I don't know why I'm so bothered by the argument that animal lives are equal to / worth more than human lives. Animals live in harmony with nature and don't destroy the earth like humans do, I won't refute that. But I just can't believe that their lives are worth more than ours. Why do I feel this way? Does it come down to a matter of optimism vs pessimism / faith vs unfaith in humanity? Help me out please!!

I don't want to turn this into a political debate, but with the whole Graham Platner situation, I've been thinking a lot about how to think about separating the politician from the politics. Political positions are SO influential on society, so if someone has good policies and will vote/act in a way that will help people, why does it matter if they are a despicable person in their personal life.

My belief (not the point of the question) is that this Senate race in Maine could tangibly change millions of peoples lives across America and the world. The whole senate rides on it, and having a progressive who will push and vote for something like M4A, defunding certain foreign militaries, not getting into foreign wars, and abolishing certain rogue federal LEO just to name a few, are things that I believe are super incredibly important.

I also truly think that if Graham Platner was put in the senate, he would be a good senator who would fight and push for all the things that I think could massively improve the country and world. I do think this might be the biggest point, where while I belief this to be true, he's clearly not a trustworthy guy, who could then use his power gained to do more horrible stuff.

BUT, he so clearly was a terrible terrible person, and is clearly just a despicable dude.

Intuitively, he should absolutely never be allowed near a political office, and quite frankly should probably be put in prison. But also, is it worth the death of kids overseas, reproductive freedoms, immigrant safety, etc... to withdraw support from him and instead get someone like Susan Collins elected who literally is the reason Roe got overturned?

I have a bit of a moral/ethical dilemma going on. Well so my uncle and aunt have decided to set my cousin brother up for an arranged marriage and well they found a girl quite quickly. That is all well and good but the thing is my cousin is a bit of a shady individual. He has stolen gold from our home, and also dabbled in sketchy credit card frauds and not to mention a string of girlfriends and he allegedly has compromising pictures of a few girls. But apparently this is a matter of past and he has improved since then.

His father is an extremely religious person and has a very good reputation so obviously all his shenanigans aren’t known in our social circles as much.

The problem here is that the girls family has no idea about all of this and although my family knows everything we absolutely cannot divulge any information as that’d place us in a conflicting situation within ourselves.

Should I try to inform the girl through some other means and warn her or should I not interfere in this matter anyway as that would be sabotaging his future relationships.

For context, I am Muslim, and revealing another person’s sins is generally discouraged in Islam. This makes the moral and ethical dilemma especially difficult for me.

Can you guys recommend some books which can be useful for someone who is just getting into indian ethics, I need to know about the basics of Vedic ethics, buddhist ethics, jain ethics and maybe regional ethical books like Tirukkural (Tamil) or some other books I have not heard of. It would be great if such a book exist which encompass all these into one.

I just need anyone who likes to have a random opinion on anything. please.

As a hobby I wrote a book. It was pretty fun and I planned for it to be a trilogy but I have a problem with the theme. the beginning of the book starts out with a detective (I know, real original, but bear with me) who is struggling to investigate a wrongful arrest made by a rich family outside her jurisdiction. Her situation snowballs when she takes a miraculous chance to talk to the rich man, only to find out that he’s drawn her in to blackmail her into an elaborate death wish scavenger hunt. It’s complicated, but the point is that she walks in having issues with this family and their now deceased patriarch because they are able to do things like arrest someone without cause or trial and walk away without consequences- so kinda a Great Gatsby type issue. Yet she ends up bonding with this family and even finding that the one who was actually responsible for the initial crime that someone else had been arrested wrongfully for was someone who had tried to help her get out of her blackmail mess, all because secretly he was in a similar mess and had empathy for her. He escapes before he’s caught, and for whatever reason she finds herself letting him go, telling everyone that she didn’t see the culprit leave. At the very end of the book, the family turns on her after learning of the stuff she had been blackmailed for. Now, she doesn’t really feel guilty about going behind their backs so much, as she never did anything truly wrong, but she does feel bad for betraying their built trust. She‘s dumbfounded when the family decides to randomly overturn their legal case against her, but the situation eerily reminds her of how they still can do anything without consequence. By the end of the first book she’s left with various questions about a mystery plot, but from a thematic angle, there’s questions that I don’t have answers to. Is it reasonable that she still loves this family, or is it a moral issue? If the family’s flaw is loyalty to their grandfather without questioning his actions, but also loyalty to the MC after a while, then is there some kind of arc that needs to happen to draw the line between virtue and vice? Is it her job to go after the culprit she let get away, or was he truly just outside her jurisdiction in many ways and meant to be far away where he never makes bad choices under pressure again?
Take this any way you’d like, or ask questions. I’m just looking for new perspective.

I worked for Company A, for about 4 years, it was a small growing company and I moved up the ranks quickly to become a manager of others. When I had to leave due to family concerns, I gave my boss (the owner) four months notice (three months is normal in my field) and tried to leave everything in good standing. The last month before I left however, tensions were running a bit high, and while I was hoping to leave as friends with the owner, we now do not speak, and I think that he may have turned others in the company (that I considered friends) against me.

I am now (7months later) working for Company B that is in a SIMILAR field as Company A. I have the opportunity to provide business/sales leads for the sales side of this company and have contacts with some of the companies that I worked with when I was with Company A. The benefits to me if these other companies signed with company B would be a decently sized bonus for me for each company that signs with B.

This is NOT the same kind of company as A; Company B would work in parallel with Company A. I would not be poaching business/money from A; only contacts.

I did not sign a non-compete with Company A. It would not be reducing Company A piece of the pie. I DO think that the owner of Company A would be furious at me; but he already is so who cares?

What do we think?

I'm very strongly opposed to using AI for anything as I find that AI, in its current implementation, cannot be used ethically, due to:

• How it's trained, in the sourcing of training data and the working conditions of the people employed in the growing model fine-tuning industry (e.g. DataAnnotation)
• Its impact on people's livelihood, in that the companies that develop and sell AI are openly in the business of replacing humans with computers without consideration for what to do with the people that are displaced (whether these companies are successful is not the point, the point is their intent);
• Its impact on people's mental health;
• Its environmental impact, through the building of new fossil fuel plants to power new data centres, the rollback of environmental protection laws in certain jurisdictions to facilitate the building of said power plants, and the impact of data centres on their immediate environment;
• The impact of data centres on the communities in which they are built.

All that to say, I'm very strongly opposed to AI use. I've disabled automatic AI queries everywhere I could and have changed my browser and search engine to one that doesn't automatically run queries when I look something up online.

I do R&D at work, which involves writing a lot of code. My current problem is that all my coworkers and superiors have been using AI to vibe-code things into existence that would normally be part of my duties to implement. I've made my position on AI known and have asked that I be at least consulted on things that would be part of my duties, and the response that I got was basically: "start using AI yourself or we'll do it for you and you get to review Claude's work".

I have started looking for another job, but in the meantime I have to decide if I stick to my principles or if I start using AI to code myself.

Is it OK for me to refuse to use AI if that refusal does not reduce AI use at my place of work, but simply makes my coworkers use it for me?

Strengths and weaknesses of hybrid expressionism? Good literature to read on this topic?

I am an anti-realist when it comes to ethics and while I try to stay open to being convinced by all positions, this is one I find incredibly unlikely to change.

As such I also do think that ethical intuitions are feelings and that often times when saying “x is wrong” it is an expression of that emotion.

However I do also believe that when someone says “x is wrong” it can often times also be interpreted as “x makes me feel BOO”

As such I came upon this view of hybrid expressivism which is new to me.

Does anyone know good literature to read so I can understand strengths/weaknesses/etc and generally develop my view on this theory?

https://decretum.substack.com/p/argument-for-moral-subjectivism

Just looking for feedback on my argument/theory on subjectivism

Hello all! I have an ethical dilemma. An expensive item that I’ve never owned mysteriously appeared on my insurance. If I file a claim for loss, the insurance company will pay and we could definitely use the money. My fiscal brain is saying yes, but my ethical brain is saying no. Please help!

Valid = not morally inappropriate or wrong requests. Legitimate requests. The kind you're entitled to ask. Or at least the ones you're given a one-time free pass to impose.

Consent-based approaches are the most trivial to interrogate with parody, exposing it's incompleteness.

Accounts that require the absence of power skew are incredibly explosive, and I'm fine with that so I probably won't comment there.

Desire-based criteria are liable to critique of desire as malformed.

Some of my own issues with sexual requests center on the sexual domination of the request itself, before anything else even happens. (even if the sexual interpreting is temporary, it becomes permanently true that at time t, this person was made into the object of a sexual request. that historical fact cannot be undone. the event passes, but the predicate remains true of their past.) This is made a little more visible when asking someone if you can give them a wedgie as you dunk their head in and out of a toilet that has real or fake excrement and piss.

Or we're exposing a bit of cognitive dissonance people have with requests.

It's made worse if there's a radical subjectivity to what is or isn't degrading or objectifying. Is choking objectively degrading or non-degrading? Who are you to say choking, "pretend" wink wink domination, humiliation, objectification, degradation, or head swirling in a toilet bowl is degrading for everyone?

There's also a performative cost to repeating people categories with what society presently "socially constructs as degrading", such as swirlies, especially once normalized. If dunking heads in toilets got very popular, especially for one gender group in particular, I guess boys/girls get to grow up being taught getting dunked is hot. Maybe some will even develop a social identity around it as an argument for representation.

The burden of toilet bowling is probably going to fall disproportionately on women for whatever that's worth, so we need to make sure to also teach men while they're young. It's pretty odd these kinds of requests fall harder and more frequently onto subordinated social groups? That's so peculiar. Guess we'll never know.

And as these people, hopefully adults, grow of age, their partners will be given the confidence and social legibility to request dunking. Very brave and subversive people will use literal piss and shit. And people who'd otherwise never be into toilet bowling might will now face pressure to perform.

(1) It selects.

The asker singles the person out as sexually relevant.

Before any answer is given, the person is no longer just present. They are now being treated as a possible site of sexual uptake.

(2) It frames.

The interaction is now placed under a sexual description.

Even if the person never wanted that frame, they are now inside it.

(3) It predicates.

The ask makes new predicates true of the person in this interaction.

They are now the one being sexually addressed, solicited, or tested.

This is the definition step.

(4) It historicizes.

The event becomes part of their past.

It is now permanently true that they were placed in that sexual position at that moment.

This is why the “it was only a question” defense is too thin. The question already did something irreversible.

(5) It makes them answerable.

The person is now required to respond somehow.

Yes, no, silence, deflection, humor, softening, or exit. All of these are responses.

Even refusal is labor.

(6) It externalizes burden.

The asker gets to discharge desire outward. The asked person has to manage the consequences.

This is the asymmetry in its clearest form.

One person exports a want. The other inherits a task.

(7) It exposes.

The asked person may now have to reveal things they did not want to reveal.

Their boundaries, discomfort, sexual disinterest, fear, relationship status, trauma history, prudery risk, or simply the fact that they do not want to be seen that way.

The ask can force unwanted self-disclosure.

(8) It instrumentalizes.

This is where the object point comes in.

The person is not literally reduced to a thing. But they are functionally treated as a site for the resolution of another person’s desire, uncertainty, or erotic initiative.

That is a real sense of objectification.

Not objectification in the sense of “you think they are an inanimate object.”

Objectification in the sense of: “You are being used as the target, testing ground, answer-source, or possible vehicle for my sexual project.”

(9) It subordinates.

The asker takes the liberty of structuring the exchange.

They set the agenda. They choose the moment. They force the relevance of the question. They make the other person react.

Even if the ask is polite, that agenda-setting power can still be domination-coded.

(10) It can recruit the person into a dominance-shaped field.

This is where the phallus point matters.

If sexuality is socially saturated by dominance signification, then being sexually requested is not just being asked for information.

It is being pulled into a field where one is being positioned relative to erotic claim, uptake, exposure, and possible subordination.

I am in an intro to philosophy class and we are reading excepts from this paper. During class we talked about how the human seeds example relates to the ethics of aborting an unintentionally conceived fetus. I personally had an idea that people and have a responsibility thrust upon them, like Spiderman. As Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility. I think most people would agree that Peter would be acting immorally by hanging up the mask, and that now he has responsibility to steward his power for good. My professor directed me to section 5 of Thomson's argument, where she makes the distinction between things that we "ought" to do and rights. After reading this I am a bit confused because I feel the the target from "What is moral?" to "Is it right for us to impose morality on you?" So my question is, are we asking about morality, or group ability to enforce morality on the individual?