D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[Maxperson]

1) If we are both special... what does special mean? What is this "specialness"

So nobody is special then? We all have uniqueness about us that makes us special.

2) Why would them eating our faces make them less special? Why is violence against humanity a deciding factor in personhood? Anyone who harms a human is not a person? That seems like a bad direction to take things. Yet it keeps coming up that a major deciding factor of "are you a person" is "do you like humanity".

The deciding factor is being human.

 

[Faolyn]

Ah, but you hit the nail directly on the head. "beyond speaking the simplest of concepts". Grammar is neccessary for complexity, but is complexity neccessary for language? Useful, certainly. There is a reason why all human languages are rather complex, but I don't think it is necessary to be categorized as "language"

Generally speaking, language by definition contains both grammar and vocabulary (with the possible exceptions of conlangs and pidgins). The sounds that the vast majority of animals make are concepts but not language. Now, a language doesn't necessarily need to be complex (relatively speaking; any language that needs to communicate ideas to other people will soon evolve to be complex out of necessity), but it has to have some form of structure to it.

 

[Guest 85555]

The recognition of the personhood of others does not negate the rationality of self-defense in the face of harm.

It doesn’t but we treat persons different than other types of life in conflict so it matters in these hypotheticals whether aliens or AI machines automatically get designated as persons. I.E. when rats ingest a building and cause disease, even if it makes us uncomfortable, we are okay eradicating them. But you would never do that to people. So if AI were running amok and causing hundreds of thousands or millions of human deaths, and all we had to do stop the carnage was turn them off with a command on the keyboard, if they were regarded as people, then that would be a bright red line we aren’t supposed to cross. You could say, ‘they are people but’ but that is s huge problem once you start applying that same logic to humanity

 

[Guest 85555]

I truly don't see why we need to be "special" for us to be able to say "harming other humans is bad". We can be unfair and treat sapient life better than non-sapient life, on the basis of sapience alone. That's allowed.

How do you arrive at 'harming humans is bad' though? And how do you avoid arriving at "harming some humans is more bad than harming others"? I would argue if you think all human life deserves protection, no matter what color, what religion, what nationality, what degree of intelligence or ability, health or infirmity, then you are effectively saying all human life shares a fundamental specialness. There have been periods where people made arguments for eugenics for example and one of the strongest ways to contend with eugenics is a sense of specialness to humanity that grants us personhood. Otherwise human life can easily be considered very cheap, or worse, costly

 

[AnotherGuy]

blink, blink

Yes, the term the romans used to describe and deride the non-latin speaking people they were conquering/going to war with/working together with was not something used to describe Romans. This is sort of obvious, and it isn't because rome was a technologically advanced country. (Who stole much of the art, science, ect ect that they used from other people.)

Yes they only stole and never invented or improved....what was I thinking....they're exactly like the D&D orc brutes with their aqueducts, judicial processes, masonry, bound books...etc

What was I thinking...it's the 21st century ofc we have to reduce certain history into absurdist levels for that all elusive vp.

Thanks for the correction. Barbaric raiders it is.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Why is it that racism threads always eventually lead to Roman apologia?

 

[Incenjucar]

Orcs aren't real and the fiction they're presented in is typically not on Earth. It is entirely possible that they invented aqueducts in many D&D worlds, just like the Assyrians and other peoples did long before the Romans.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Why is it that racism threads always eventually lead to Roman apologia?

Reductionism for the win

 

[Guest 85555]

Orcs aren't real and the fiction they're presented in is typically not on Earth. It is entirely possible that they invented aqueducts in many D&D worlds, just like the Assyrians and other peoples did long before the Romans.

My orcs have aqueducts and colosseums.

I love Roman history but I don't think these tangents into it when one is trying to prove a large point about orcs being civil or not is helpful (too often I find people, myself included, sacrifice good history into order to make their case). Real history is a lot more nuanced and harder to analyze than fantasy worlds.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Orcs aren't real and the fiction they're presented in is typically not on Earth. It is entirely possible that they invented aqueducts in many D&D worlds, just like the Assyrians and other peoples did long before the Romans.

I'm still waiting for Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms to acknowledge their great masonry expertise. I feel we've waited long enough now after Tolkien's death - there needs to be some improvement in their true fantastical history. For the love of Marcus Aurelias, and the Horde!