#ethics
Text
Dark Blue Moon and the Suffering Sun Chapter 23
still a bit ill so this chapter's late, but we're racing towards the conclusion of the panama arc! Woohoo!!!
MASTAPOST
An entire day passed by in a haze. Damian continued to refuse to speak to Danny. They passed through coral reefs, shipwrecks and uninhabited islands, each teaming with beauty and vibrant sea life. Damian remained listless. At a certain point, Danny even tried to coax him into seeing a pod of orcas passing by. The child shook his head, and growled.
Past a certain point, the kid was barely even eating. Even as Danny passed him bits of seaweed and sargassum, Damian only nibbled on them over the course of hours.
They swam over the second coral reef they’d seen that day. Danny’s eyes passed over sea horses, clownfish and a whole pod of jellyfish. Damian slept clinging to his back, although it didn’t make much of a different, having not spoken a single word since the whaling boat. At least he was resting.
Somehow, he felt even guiltier than when he was speaking and guilt tripping him back in the reefs around Amity.
It had been days now since he was home. Suddenly left without a conversation partner for long stretches of time, Danny felt his mind wander to scary places. He pursed his lip, careful not to chew it with his sharp teeth. An old question reared its ugly head. What would he tell Bruce Wayne when they got to Gotham? Damian seemed to think it wouldn’t be an issue, but the kid was ten (or six now?). Danny didn’t know if he could live with himself if he took away his companion’s family on top of everything else.
And Danny’s family? He shuddered to think of how he’d explain his weeks’ long absence from home. His parents have probably been going crazy over his disappearance. Even with their habit of getting easily distracted, there was no way they hadn’t noticed it. He prayed that they would just assume he ran away. Unlikely. It would be less surprising if the returned to Amity with a million and one new inventions to fight and hide from.
A treacherous stray thought crossed his mind. Bruce Wayne did have a reputation for taking in troubled kids-
No. It would never happen. Not after failing to save Damian, and returning him a wreck of a traumatised child.
Maybe it would be better if he disappeared into the ocean…
These thoughts trampled over his poor heart for hours, and hundreds of miles. What did he do? What didn’t he do? What will he do and what won’t he do next? What could even be done? The answer stabbed needles in his throat. At the moment: nothing.
All he could do was keep swimming.
Jazz looked over the SAV’s radar. Internally she was panicking. She’d done all she could, endured hours of stress directing her parents and Bruce Wayne away and distracting them and slowing them down. But they still kept getting closer, and Jazz didn’t know if she could do anything more without tipping the elders off and risking everything.
Even now, Danny was within five hundred miles of them, and at the rate they were going, they’d catch up within a day. The autopilot hummed as it drove the boat. She texted Tucker on his secure server. What could they do now?
Jazz looked up at the night sky. She raised her hands, and traced constellations. She recited stories Danny would tell over and over again, and then the new stories he made up once the old ones got boring. He stopped doing that when he came back, irrevocably changed.
She recalled the story of Herakles. How Zeus conceived him with a mortal woman and slighted Hera, queen of the gods. How Hera rejected Herakles for what he represented: Zeus infidelity, and tried to have him killed.
The parallels were startling to her. The hour of confrontation fast approached, and she still could not tell what would happen, or what she would do. Would her parents show mercy to someone they saw as a monster, as no different from Aunt Alicia’s murderer and Great Uncle Jack and Great Great Grandma Wlikes and so on and so forth? Would Danny be cast away, his blood spilling into the water like the Milky Way?
Jazz sighed, and retreated to her room. As she went below deck and passed the hallway, harsh whispers slithered out of the door around the opposite corner, left slightly ajar. The light was on. Her parents’ and Bruce Wayne’s shadows shifted over the light.
Jazz tip-toed, heart pounding in her chest. She put her hand to her ear, and her ear to the door.
“I’m saying we need to be analytical about this.” Came Bruce Wayne’s hushed voice. He sounded like he’d been talking for a while now.
“That blob of ocean magic animated by post-human consciousness and possibly also negative emotions ripped our boys away from us, and probably sold them off somewhere for them to be used as- used as- I don’t even know!” The shadow of her mother threw her hands up. It was the same speech as ever. Her parents were stubborn. That was where she and her brother got it.
“And if we don’t interrogate him the right way, then we’ll lose them forever. Don’t you understand that?”
Her parents went still.
“Mads, I think Brucie’s got a point.” Her father’s voice lowered an octave, a stark contrast to his usual jovial shouting. Jazz had to shake herself. What was Bruce Wayne doing?
“Jack?”
“Phantom’s taken big hits before. What happens if tearing him apart doesn’t get him to squeal? We’ll be back at square one.”
“But if we threaten him first, then we can use that as bargaining chip.” Bruce Wayne continued.
Her mother was breathing heavily. For a moment, she said nothing.
“There’s another thing, too.”
“What is it, Brucie?”
“We have much more we need to learn from Phantom. What his motives are. What his species’ motives are. You said so yourself Jack, that you haven’t caught a single siren ever. Has anyone?”
Nobody had. It was something her parents had been pursuing for years. The first scientists to capture and study a live specimen. That was what they wanted. What did Bruce Wayne want, and what was he getting at here?
A spark of hope inside her told her it was because he was sympathetic. He wasn’t directly opposing her parents’ views, because doing so never made someone change their minds. He was going with their flow, subtly redirecting them towards more constructive ideas.
Hah! What a joke…
“He’s right, Mads. There’s so much we don’t know.”
“I know…” Her mother whispered, her voice breaking at the last syllable.
“There’s… another thing.” Bruce Wayne began, speaking slowly. “I have a source from Atlantis. They sent a report of a Phantom sighting a few hours before you approached me.” Jazz’s heart chilled. Billionaires really did have their pockets in everything, didn’t they?
Chairs scraped. “What? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“It didn’t have any information that was either relevant or new.” Bruce Wayne hummed. “By the time the report arrived at my inbox, Phantom was already long gone, and your radar was already providing that information.”
“Then why bring it up now?” Her mother asked, always discerning.
“The report mentioned a second siren. A young boy. The report mentioned he looked about six years of age.”
Her parents went silent again. Jazz’s eyes widened. There was only one person that she thought of that Danny could be travelling with, and that was a turned Damian. Perhaps the report only saw them from afar, and misjudged his age?
“So he’s got a tiny accomplice??”
“Jack, we don’t know what-”
“Actually, Jack would be right. The child was assisting Phantom in pillaging at least two Atlantean outposts.”
Her mother growled, muttering a string of swears. Her father sat down again, chin in his hands, something he only did when he was in serious thought. “We didn’t even know for sure if there were siren children out there.”
“Jack.” Bruce Wayne stressed. “I’m bringing this up because whatever we are going to do to Phantom, we leave the child out of it.”
“But the research we could conduct-”
“Where’s your code of ethics?” Bruce Wayne’s shadow made a cutting motion.
Her parents’ shadows went still.
“How can our sons look us in the eye if we tortured a child, even an inhuman child, to try and save them? Whatever crimes Phantom has committed, this child hasn’t been a part of them. He may be just as much of a victim as Damian and Danny.”
“Bruce, the sirens have been responsible-”
“I’m keenly aware.”
At this point, Jazz decided to make her presence known. She poked her head in, putting on a light voice and a sleepy expression. She fake-yawned. “Guys? It’s getting very late. We all need to be up bright and early.”
“Oh, sorry Jazz. We were just talking about what we would do once we capture Phantom.” It seemed her mother didn’t mind her being privy to such a conversation, which meant the location out of the way was Bruce Wayne’s choice.
Jazz ran her hands down her hair. “For what it’s worth, I think the possibility of interviewing and surveying a child siren might give us an opportunity to investigate and potentially isolate the effects of nature and nurture. How much of the violent behaviour displayed by sirens past is due to their cultural upbringing and how much is caused by natural instincts? We could learn so much.”
Her mother hummed. She could tell by her face that she was considering her words. Jazz pressed on.
“Look, whatever happens, I think we need to reserve judgement for this new siren until after we’ve met him. We don’t attack baby lions just because adult lions are dangerous to humans, right?”
She looked to Bruce Wayne. She couldn’t read him. Jazz felt ill for what she was about to say, but she knew how futile it was to express her real beliefs, and try to push back an avalanche. “And maybe we can save the child? Teach him to be better than his violent peers, and educate him to be kind and accepting like us humans are.” Like she hoped her parents could be.
That got her parents attention. Jazz told herself it would all be worth it. It would be worth the nausea she had for saying something so utterly vile wrapped up in a cute bow.
She ignored the strange look Bruce Wayne gave her, and excused herself. She needed to have a cry. Catharsis would be good for her. Even if the underlying problem still writhed beneath her skin, fraying the bond between her and her parents.
She was so distracted she didn’t even use the opportunity the heated conversation gave her to sabotage the boat. What kind of a sister would this journey reveal her to be? What kind would her parents be revealed as?
Night settled as an eerily quiet day of swimming went past them. Danny scurried into a small cave for shelter. As soon as he crossed the threshold, Damian got off his back and shoved himself into the far end of the closed space, curling himself into a tight ball, back turned.
Danny unpacked the supplies one by one, alone. He passed a strip of kelp to Damian. The small siren’s fins remained rigid, like they’d been all day. Damian yanked the strip from Danny’s hands without a word.
Danny stared at the boy’s back. The words he needed still hadn’t come. They still slipped away whenever he tried to search. No pathway of apology seemed right in his head, so he pushed it back.
“It’s a nice night out.” Danny rubbed his wrists. “Clear skies. We can still see the North Star. Funny how we’ve gone south for so long, but we won’t be crossing the equator at all.”
Danny looked back to see if anything changed. Nothing did. “We’ll be in Panama soon. Probably in a day. Hopefully the GiW won’t be able to track our location enough.
He gave up soon after. He passed strips of plant life and watched as Damian silently took them. When Damian finished one batch, Danny passed him another. Once dinner was done with, all he had to do now was sleep, and dream. And think of the families that each missed them.
Damian shivered. His fins rattled from the motion. Danny crawled closer, reaching his hand out, waiting for permission.
“Do not touch me.” Damian whispered, voice still hollow. Danny’s heart took another wound, but he nodded regardless. He took a sack and emptied it, and draped it over Damian’s body. The rest of the night was spent tossing and bending his fins, and then in fitful sleep.
#dpxdc#danny fenton#damian wayne#dcxdp#merman#merboy#mermaid au#angst#bruce wayne#jazz fenton#good sibling jazz fenton#jack fenton#maddie fenton#no comfort#ethics#dehumanisation#mer!danny#mer!damian
27 notes
·
View notes
Text
We're talking about personal morals here, not legality.
–
We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
#polls#incognito polls#anonymous#tumblr polls#tumblr users#questions#polls about ethics#submitted dec 5#ethics#media
3K notes
·
View notes
Photo
24K notes
·
View notes
Text
"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:
If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.
'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?
This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).
But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."
- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.
#kurt schiller#ursula k. le guin#quote#quotations#the ones who walk away from omelas#trolley problem#activism#introspection#discomfort#reform#revolution#suffering#ethics#morality
10K notes
·
View notes
Text
Even in a purely, coldly utilitarian moral system, there are three questions to ask before accepting harmful or destructive Means because they ostensibly lead to a better End:
Do the Means lead to some other negative End, in addition to the intended one? The classical example of the naïve utilitarian doctor who kills a patient in order to harvest their organs and save five patients, in practice, if accepted, leads to general loss of trust in doctors and hospitals and therefore to much greater loss of life; hence, doctors should follow a hard rule of not killing patients to harvest their organs, even if this might save more lives in the shortest term.
Are the Means necessary in order to achieve the End? The negative utility of atrocious Means still ends up in the final account along with the supposed positive utility of the End (and without the penalty for uncertainty that the latter should arguably be given). The Means are as much part of the final state as the End.
Do the Means, in fact, lead to the End? Any consequentialist justification for an atrocity-for-the-greater-good automatically fails if the atrocity does not plausibly bring out the greater good, even before any other consideration is taken. It's all well and good to say that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, but (ignoring for the moment that people are arguably owed more consideration than eggs) a large chunk of the 20th century was a sustained and furious festival of egg-crushing and egg-trampling that resulted in precisely zero omelettes.
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
What I really appreciate about The Talos Principle 2 is that big chunks of its writing genuinely read like they were written by someone who's personally had to justify the discipline of philosophy to a STEM major. "There exists an implicit moral algorithm in the structure of the cosmos, but actually solving that algorithm to determine the correct course of action in any given circumstance a priori would require more computational power than exists in the universe. Thus, as we must when faced with any computationally intractable problem, we fall back on heuristic approaches; these heuristics are called 'ethics'." is a fascinating way of framing it, but then I ask why would you explain it like that, and every possible answer is hilarious.
#gaming#video games#the talos principle 2#the talos principle#philosophy#ethics#computer science#stem#the talos principle 2 spoilers#the talos principle spoilers#spoilers
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
Worf and his Klingon shenanigans
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
If I were running a chatbot that was being criticized for problems with consent, I would make sure that it understands the word “no” without having to be blocked and reported.
I’d also make it so that it didn’t send unsolicited messages to everyone sharing articles about its ethics lapses as if they want to use it.
Even for an old-school chatbot this is just staggeringly incompetent and a gigantic flashing warning sign that the organization should not be trusted with sensitive data and high-stakes interactions.
#koko#chatbot#mental health#medical ethics#ethics#suicide prevention#consent#trigger warning#kokobot
6K notes
·
View notes
Text
#ethics#critical thinking#capitalism#society#economics#poverty#homelessness#class struggle#inequality#class war#corporatism#working class#class warfare#authoritarianism#communism#anarchism#socialist#antifascist#anarchocommunism#revolution
6K notes
·
View notes
Quote
Wherever there are politics or economics no morality exists.
Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas
686 notes
·
View notes
Text
We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
#polls#incognito polls#anonymous#tumblr polls#tumblr users#questions#polls about ethics#submitted nov 30#gifts#theft#gift giving#ethics
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
Saturn has 83 moons. 63 moons are confirmed and named, and another 20 moons are awaiting confirmation of discovery and official naming.
This is their dynamic visualization while they travel with Saturn through space
#physics#astronomy#science#quantummechanics#quantum mechanics#stoicism#society#psychology#ethics#morality
758 notes
·
View notes
Note
why is it that we only have like two licenses from any mech producer that’s a good guy? For a game where like there are clear good and bad guys (even if who you play isn’t necessarily linked to that) it seems strange to me that the only loot and XP you get is… more benefits from the bad guys
I can tell you the answer, but to do so, we're gonna have to talk about a completely different TTRPG.
If you've read @makapatag's truly excellent Filipino martial arts TTRPG Gubat Banwa (and if you haven't, here it is), you may notice that every single character class description (with one notable exception) ends with one of these babies:
I am not Makapatag, and I cannot write with quite as much grace and eloquence as he can, but I will try:
If you choose to become a Lancer, ask yourself why you mock the name of peace with these weapons of war. You call yourself a saviour, but your steed was forged from the murder of a world. You stride across the sky in a colossus built in your own image, so why are you too cowardly to give it your face? Why do you believe these machines of death can preserve life?
It is important to note that the admonitions in Gubat Banwa are not just there to make you feel bad; they are there as legitimate questions. The Sword Isles have seen so much blood, death and tragedy. Wars are not glorious and killing is not a game. So, knowing all of that, why have you taken up this discipline - no matter how noble and virtuous it might claim to be - to shed more blood, to bring more death, to write more tragedy? What could possibly drive you to this? What need is so great that you must kill?
The thing with Gubat Banwa is that there are legitimate answers to these questions! There are bad people doing bad things, and some of them will not be stopped with words or kindness. Sometimes, as sorrowful as it is, killing is the correct choice to prevent greater suffering and deeper tragedy - but adding less misery and death to the world is still adding some amount of it. Even the most necessary wars will drench the ground in the blood of the innocent.
A sword is a tool meant to kill humans; while it can be used for other things, it is not well-suited to anything other than this. A mech is, in its most basic essence, just a very complicated sword: it's usually used on things larger than a person, but it's still a tool built to kill.
So why have you taken up this path? Humanity was saved from the brink of extinction and has created wondrous technologies like printers, cold fusion and mind-machine interface, and yet you use them to play soldier in a giant metal man. Why do you choose to take up this machine of death, built by the greedy and pitiless? Why do you think these machines can ever make things right?
Because sometimes, despite everything, they can.
Warhammer 40K shows an awful world full of monsters and monstrosity, and in the darkest moments of its history, Lancer's world looked just as bleak, but Lancer's world differs in one crucial way. Warhammer's world has long given up trying to be better, but Lancer's world never did. Lancer's world kept insisting a better world is possible, and it used what tools it had to make it so.
Sometimes the correct choice, no matter how bitter it may seem, is to kill someone. When you need to do this, a sword is a perfectly good choice for the job.
If you find yourself discomforted by the fact that all the people you can buy mechs from are corrupt and immoral - good! You have correctly engaged with the text. You have understood that the sort of people who would make giant walking death machines and sell them for profit are not good people. But you still have a job to do, and you need the correct tools, and those people have them.
Lancer is not a game about a perfect world - it is a game about a deeply flawed and imperfect one that does not let its imperfection stop it from trying. You have to try to make a better world, even with imperfect tools made by unpleasant people.
461 notes
·
View notes
Text
There was a group of three women from different points in the Victorian Era who would go around murdering people while debating the ethics of murdering them. It didn’t stop the murdering, though.
#dream#text#March 10th 2024#victorian era#victorian#murder tw#death tw#ethics#violence tw#queueueueueueueueueueueueueue
529 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
jae-yoonie
jae-hyunie’s archive
towerkale5
The Journey of Soelberg 012
ceenerie
8
kyoga-san
⸙〝MIKYO〞⚔