NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6183064" data-attributes="member: 42582">These are highly contentious claims. And showing this doesn't require discussing real-world rites and beliefs pertaining to dead bodies. It can be done by pointing to real-world customs of inheritance.Suppose that your great-aunt has a doll collection. And upon her death she leaves the collection to you. Do you sell it, or keep it? At least some people would regard as relevant to this decision the fact that the collection was something that was special to their great aunt. That is, they would regard the doll collection as being in a completely different category from the content of their late great-aunt's garbage bin, which clearly is something that she has rejected as meaningless to her.In my own kitchen I have a tablespoon that I use only occasionally, when I am baking. The spoon originally belonged to my late grandmother. When I use it I think of her. It is not as meaningless, to me, as other cutlery that I simply bought at a shop.None of this depends upon anyone thinking that a late family member's soul is living in their doll collection, or in their kitchenware.These examples raise interesting questions about the extent to which value is under the voluntary control of individuals. Different moral systems answer this question differently (eg preference utilitarians say yes; eudaimonic utilitarians say no; orthodox deontoligists say no; Hobbesian deontologists say yes; etc).But even suppose that it is permissible for me, reborn or reincarnated, to reanimate my body as a zombie, how would it follow that it is permissible for someone else to do that? On a Lockean theory, perhaps I can alienate my right to them (though the question of which rights are alienable is itself hotly debated) - but in the typical picture of D&D necromancy, they don't seek permission before animating corpses.Assuming that eating cows is permissible (personally I'm a vegetarian), then that would not be because those who eat them disdain them, but becaues they have objective features (eg lack of personality) that render them liable to be killed and eaten. How does the fact that a vampire is old and powerful, and hence perhaps has disdain for ordinary peopel, tend to show that those people are liable to the same fate? I'm not seeing it.If the argument is simply that permissibility of eating is warranted by disdain or lack of respect, I think that argument is obviously flawed, at least as far as most moral systems are concerned, and also (I think) within the D&D framework.</blockquote>

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