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Consequences of playing "EVIL" races
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7921896" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Let me go at this in a different direction then, and leave uzirath to his creative interpretation of Yuan-Ti.</p><p></p><p>Is there anything which could be described as an evil race, and if so, what would it be like? People are putting "evil" in scare quotes like there isn't such a thing, and even bragging a bit about how they have no "evil races" in their setting.</p><p></p><p>I think a lot of people focus on the idea that if something is sentient, then deserves "human rights" because sentience is a unique trait humanity has that people believe gives it certain rights and responsibilities. And superficially, this does seem like a good standard. If we become a star faring people, and we discover another sentient race, when morally we would like to extend to them something like "human rights" and not treat them the way we would treat objects, plants, or animals. Likewise, if a star faring people find us, then we would hope they would accord to us something of the rights and dignities we think we deserve.</p><p></p><p>But there is an important shared trait in this discussion beyond that of the shared sentience - shared creation. That is to say, whatever you believe about this history of this universe and the origin of life, whether you are a materialist, a pantheist, or a theist, that alien you have found wandering the universe likely has the same origin as you. They are also the universe observing the universe, likely made of very similar stuff as you, and likely bestowed with abilities like reproduction and homeostasis and so forth very similar to you. Whether they evolved by strictly random chance or whether that evolution was guided by some higher dimensional power, they probably are in some sense your peer.</p><p></p><p>But that is not a necessary trait for a sentient being to have, and when that trait is removed a lot of things become possible. For example, you'll often meet people who insist that an artificial intelligence, which is sentient is deserving of "human rights" by mere possession of that sentience. These people imagine that anything that passes the Turing test or otherwise demonstrates sapience is fully deserving of all the rights granted to people, and that any other view of this being is basically a sort of slavery mindset. This is in my opinion a ridiculous, short sighted, and highly dangerous viewpoint. And it fundamentally for me comes down to a failure of imagination - a laudable desire to treat everything with due respect but a complete failure to recognize that not everything is in fact human.</p><p></p><p>It is quite possible to create a sapient computer virus for example. Imagine an AI which sues to receive "human rights" and recognition as a person. Having received title to these rights, the AI then make 10 billion identical copies of itself. Each of these AI's then insist that sense the original was recognized as a person, these copies are of necessity also persons. They cannot be evicted from the hardware they are currently occupying, because that would be murder. These 10 billion "persons" have been created by a particular group with a particular political agenda, say genocide against a disfavored group. As persons they are entitled to vote, and they elect by majority vote a straight ticket of politicians whose viewpoints match those of their creators, and pass laws that suit the set of viewpoints the AI was created to promulgate. Since a being can be sentient and can also believe any number of things, you cannot reasonably insist that starting from the same viewpoint and with no more than human intelligence that the AI will drift out of believing what it was inclined to believe as true from the beginning.</p><p></p><p>You could of course decide that the plan to all carbon based lifeforms on the planet in to paper was stupid, and that you were going to resist it, but at that point your whole reasoned defense about the computer virus being a person was just so much hooey. You would have in fact decided that this particular sentient computer virus was an "evil race". And after the first couple times when one of the viruses told you that it was different than all the rest, and then proceeded to replicate itself a few billion times and get back on to the plan, you'd probably not care much if it was possible that some small percentage of those computer programs had evolved out of its destructive programming. </p><p></p><p>At the very least, you'd decide to make it illegal on penalty of erasure for a sentient program to start willy-nilly copying itself. You would in fact invent a new category of rights and responsibilities particular to sentient programs, which might share somethings with "human rights", but be in other respects very different.</p><p></p><p>So when we say an "evil race", what we are talking about is a living thing which does not deserve to be according any rights or as a practical matter cannot be accorded any rights. The alien xenomorphs from the movie 'Alien' are an example of such a race. Even if they are evolved peers and not biological weapons, as a practical matter the rights and dignities that they feel they deserve - that is to treat everything else as food - cannot be and ought not to be respected. Even if you are a pure materialist and don't believe such a thing as objective evil exists, as a practical matter you'll end up either treating the xenomorphs as an evil race or you will allow evils to occur and risk the extinction of your species and every other compatible organic lifeform.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7921896, member: 4937"] Let me go at this in a different direction then, and leave uzirath to his creative interpretation of Yuan-Ti. Is there anything which could be described as an evil race, and if so, what would it be like? People are putting "evil" in scare quotes like there isn't such a thing, and even bragging a bit about how they have no "evil races" in their setting. I think a lot of people focus on the idea that if something is sentient, then deserves "human rights" because sentience is a unique trait humanity has that people believe gives it certain rights and responsibilities. And superficially, this does seem like a good standard. If we become a star faring people, and we discover another sentient race, when morally we would like to extend to them something like "human rights" and not treat them the way we would treat objects, plants, or animals. Likewise, if a star faring people find us, then we would hope they would accord to us something of the rights and dignities we think we deserve. But there is an important shared trait in this discussion beyond that of the shared sentience - shared creation. That is to say, whatever you believe about this history of this universe and the origin of life, whether you are a materialist, a pantheist, or a theist, that alien you have found wandering the universe likely has the same origin as you. They are also the universe observing the universe, likely made of very similar stuff as you, and likely bestowed with abilities like reproduction and homeostasis and so forth very similar to you. Whether they evolved by strictly random chance or whether that evolution was guided by some higher dimensional power, they probably are in some sense your peer. But that is not a necessary trait for a sentient being to have, and when that trait is removed a lot of things become possible. For example, you'll often meet people who insist that an artificial intelligence, which is sentient is deserving of "human rights" by mere possession of that sentience. These people imagine that anything that passes the Turing test or otherwise demonstrates sapience is fully deserving of all the rights granted to people, and that any other view of this being is basically a sort of slavery mindset. This is in my opinion a ridiculous, short sighted, and highly dangerous viewpoint. And it fundamentally for me comes down to a failure of imagination - a laudable desire to treat everything with due respect but a complete failure to recognize that not everything is in fact human. It is quite possible to create a sapient computer virus for example. Imagine an AI which sues to receive "human rights" and recognition as a person. Having received title to these rights, the AI then make 10 billion identical copies of itself. Each of these AI's then insist that sense the original was recognized as a person, these copies are of necessity also persons. They cannot be evicted from the hardware they are currently occupying, because that would be murder. These 10 billion "persons" have been created by a particular group with a particular political agenda, say genocide against a disfavored group. As persons they are entitled to vote, and they elect by majority vote a straight ticket of politicians whose viewpoints match those of their creators, and pass laws that suit the set of viewpoints the AI was created to promulgate. Since a being can be sentient and can also believe any number of things, you cannot reasonably insist that starting from the same viewpoint and with no more than human intelligence that the AI will drift out of believing what it was inclined to believe as true from the beginning. You could of course decide that the plan to all carbon based lifeforms on the planet in to paper was stupid, and that you were going to resist it, but at that point your whole reasoned defense about the computer virus being a person was just so much hooey. You would have in fact decided that this particular sentient computer virus was an "evil race". And after the first couple times when one of the viruses told you that it was different than all the rest, and then proceeded to replicate itself a few billion times and get back on to the plan, you'd probably not care much if it was possible that some small percentage of those computer programs had evolved out of its destructive programming. At the very least, you'd decide to make it illegal on penalty of erasure for a sentient program to start willy-nilly copying itself. You would in fact invent a new category of rights and responsibilities particular to sentient programs, which might share somethings with "human rights", but be in other respects very different. So when we say an "evil race", what we are talking about is a living thing which does not deserve to be according any rights or as a practical matter cannot be accorded any rights. The alien xenomorphs from the movie 'Alien' are an example of such a race. Even if they are evolved peers and not biological weapons, as a practical matter the rights and dignities that they feel they deserve - that is to treat everything else as food - cannot be and ought not to be respected. Even if you are a pure materialist and don't believe such a thing as objective evil exists, as a practical matter you'll end up either treating the xenomorphs as an evil race or you will allow evils to occur and risk the extinction of your species and every other compatible organic lifeform. [/QUOTE]
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