With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

So... I don’t want to say anything too insulting, but what you’re describing sounds sort of like textbook sociopathy. Now, I’m not an expert by any measure of the word, but: Antisocial behavior such as a tendency to lash out at people that make you angry, coupled with a lack of a personal morality system.

 

.................


Murder is not the theft of a Mars Bar.

 

Responses in a spoiler, because it's rather long:

Spoiler: Long text

Yes, but practically speaking, is there that much difference between someone murdering 10,000 or 100,000 people? Your, or my, response to any person who did either of those two things would be basically identical, despite a order of magnitude difference between the two.

I don't consider that insulting. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm crazy one way or another, so being that particular brand of crazy wouldn't be that huge of a deal.

I'm not sure if that's the reason behind it or not. It's... very complicated, trying to figure this stuff out. But, hmm... let me elaborate a little on the "can't be moral" thing. It might help illustrate the problem a bit.


So that sounds really weird, right? "Can't even try, regardless of whether or not you'd fail? How's that work?" Well, let me give a example of something else that should help clarify it: I have a hoarding problem.

"That's all well and, well, not good, but how does it relate?" Simple. I regularly keep trash, mainly food wrappings, etc. I acknowledge that this junk is useless and should be thrown out, I have absolutely no use for it, and in the astonishingly unlikely scenario that I really need a old candy wrapper, I can get a new one more easily than digging through a pile. It causes many issues trying to keep the junk, and I'd be much better throwing it out. Put simply, I have no delusions about actually needing or wanting any of it.

"So, why not just throw it out?" Well, that's a bit hard to describe. If I try to actually get rid of any of it, it's... unpleasant. And impossible. It's a bit like a increasingly frantic battle of will against who-the-fuck-knows-what, where my entire body locks up, and it requires constant concentration to even continue to consider throwing it out. Like something out of a bad fucking sci-fi novel about mind control, but I swear I'm telling the truth here.

So instead, I've just very painstakingly mapped out the borders of this weird region of "YOU CANNOT THINK OR DO THIS" and learned to work around it. I can compress trash, take it partially apart so it takes less room, I can get rid of food waste if it can wash down a drain or be made to do so (so, almost all of it with a in-sink garbage disposal), I can leave stuff around so that other people throw it out, and so on. If I think too much about it, it causes issues; if I see a piece of trash, and I'm not careful to not think about it, I enter a sort of self-reinforcing loop where attempts to not hoard it result in a stronger impulse to hoard it. I once almost ended up biking miles to a dump at 2 A.M. in a attempt to regain a old blanket. But I've managed it very carefully and taken steps to reduce the amount of waste I make, and so, even after years, I've managed to only have a few bins of old nick-nacks that I could stand to get rid of, and one small bin of containers of very compressed paper&plastic waste which is relatively clean and not-smelly.

There are other things, similar to this. Anger and lashing out, for one (actually never at people; not physically anyway, I absolutely argue the fuck out of people on the internet. But I have broken many keyboards and computer monitors). A annoying habit of occasionally having no choice but to blink both eyes, simultaneously, twice, at every dot-like punctuation or line, 4x for lowercase "i", and 4x for lowercase "j". Touching surfaces with both hands, or in extreme cases with every single digit exactly the same number of times. It goes on.


This could perhaps illuminate what I mean when I say that I am incapable of being good by my own definition. After all, one puts rather less faith in free will, when you will yourself to not do something and then do it anyway. Frequently.

 

Ok.

I'm not going to comment on your issues, or sanity. I will suggest that you do need some type of help, and I'm nowhere near the kind of expert to advise on that.

Let me try some thing.

Killing 1. A small kid is killed in a slow, deliberate, horrible way.

Killing 2. A guy accidently killed somebody in a sports game.


Are they the same thing? How about somebody who kills a horrible person, but when nobody is in fear of their life?


To judge an event, you have to take events into account. So, when you talk 10,000 to 100,000, I can only say, there is not enough info to decide.




I'm not trying to arguing here. It's just a fact, people are different, and so are their actions, and circmstances. Either take that into account, or you are going to be wrong in your evaluations. That's just existance.

 

There are significant differences between all those actions, obviously, but that's not the crux of the issue. When comparing 10,000 to 100,000, you could just say "they were all exactly the same, it's just that the second guy did 10x more"; you could use whatever specifics you want at that point.

The actual issue is, after a certain cutoff, you can only describe the difference in "evil". You can't be 10x more disgusted by someone who killed 10x more people, or you can't sentence him to death 10x more. There is a maximum response to evil in all regards, unless the universe is infinite and you take advantage of that for arbitrarily long punishments up to infinity. So practically speaking, once a person hits the 'maximum' amount of evil that caps out any and all plausible responses to that evil, it doesn't matter how much more evil they are.

 

Ah. So, you're saying there's a maximum response to evil.


True. Humans have limits.



There is a couple of ways to think of responses to evil actions, as the Prison System general is split on.

They are deterance, as in, if we punish, we will convince prospective evil doers to take another path. And, rehabilatation. Where we fix the problem in the person, so they won't want to do evil again.

Both are about preventing more evil. Neither are about the previous evil, as that cannot be changed, and no matter how hard you punish somebody, that will not take back the actions in question.

The biggest issue? Neither seem to work all that well.


I'm a bit Old Testament, in a way. An Eye for an Eye, means that you don't get a lot of repeat murderers.


On that basis, if you catch the guy on his 100th murder, and put him down, well, he's not going to hit 10k, is he?


Not sure this helps, but I'm finding it interesting. Better than the last time I went to a philosophy website. They really didn't want to talk philosophy at all.

Stupid echo chamber.

 

No, you are completely missing the point. Think if it like Hell in this story. No one really thought about it. People do bad, they go to Hell. Then a portal to Hell opens up, and you see just what Hell means and how many people get sent there. If you are a deluded person, it makes you uncomfortable and you try not to think about it. Maybe lie to yourself and think most of those people shouldn't be there.

But the thing is, most people probably do deserve it. Because people really do act terribly to their fellow man in a myriad of little ways every single moment, and then think they don't.

Like think of all evil and suffering that can be caused by a politician voting in a corrupt law, and now think of all the people that voted for him, or didn't vote at all. Think of all the suffering that can be caused by not even a self serving government, but even just a beuratically uncaring one. But people don't like to think they bear any responsibility for the governments they support as legitimate. They want the sovereignty to rest with the people, but not the moral responsibility that comes with it.

I read an article once about police rounding up homeless, confiscating personal possessions, and destroying them. Things like tents and sleeping bags, things keeping them from exposure to the elements, the little personal property they had in the world. They probably wouldn't consider themselves hellbound, or the politicians who had them do it, or the citizens paying taxes to fund it and not explicitly opposing it once they knew what was happening. And yet if they ended up there, should they really be surprised?

One thing you can do in that situation is decide that the root problem is not the behavior, but the concept that certain actions deserve to be hellbound in the first place. That the whole system is just so much bullshit, and not something you should be basing an afterlife on.

Buggy thinks the same thing about immorality. It a bunch of bullshit, and really not something you should be basing a system of laws and punishment on. And when you see how moral imperatives exacerbate things for the worse in things like abortion law and the war on drugs, you start to think he has a point.

 

What? How can you decouple morality, laws and punishment?

 

Guys this is really off topic
Do you mind:

• stopping
• going to an aproppriate thread
• starting an aproppriate thread if none exists or
• taking this to PMs

Whichever you prefer

 

Enter politics? Become a part of the criminal justice system? It's done often enough that it must be easy to do.

 

I'd say that's overlooking one significant factor: a desire for retribution. Lots of people want other people that they consider bad to suffer, even if they don't quite admit it or even realize it. Prison is a solution that satisfies (poorly) several different desires.

Some people like prison because it has a element of rehabilitation.
Some people like prison, because it isolates a source of evil without committing what they perceive as another evil (that is, killing).
Some people like prison because it makes the people they demonize suffer.

The differences between all these schools of thought is probably why prisons are such a contentious subject.

It works, certainly. Personally I think the biggest thing that could stand to be fixed about the entire justice system (in any country) are the people who make up the system(innocent people included).

It doesn't matter how well you design a clock, it's not going to keep time very well if all the gears are deformed.

Hah! Yeah, that's a common issue.

That's a lot of it, but not the whole picture. For reasons I elaborated on earlier, I don't really place that much stock in free will and self-determination and all those other fluffybunny feelgood things. Turns out that trying to exercise that 'free will' to do something, and ending up doing not that, on a daily basis, will shatter that illusion damned quickly.


Describing a whole morality is a big complicated and difficult, but I generally share a lot with 'common human morality'. Pain and suffering is bad (unless you want it), being allowed to exercise (perceived) free will is good, beauty is good, ugliness is bad, ect. Death is neutral, however; if it reduces suffering or other evils its good, if it violates free will its bad, etc.

But another aspect is that I sort of roll in... aspects of a person into morality, because as I see it they're intimately intertwined because people aren't self determining; the evilness of a evil person is derived from quirks of neurochemistry, genetics, environment, sheer chance, etc. It's not a choice, because I'm doubtful of the very existence of choice itself. Certainly if it exists, it's not a big factor.


So, my biggest issue with humans is that we do evil, regularly, as you describe. Much, much more than we think we do. But the "evilness" comes not from the end result, but the causative factors; societal pressures and evil norms, hard-wired attributes of the brain like peer norming or tribalism/ingroup v.s. outgroup mentality, and even the inadequate capabilities of the human brain in general.

And those? Those are basically universal. The only way someone in this day and age would be excluded from all of those is a combination of unlikely circumstances and unlikely combinations of mental ailments. But expecting that to happen by pure chance is a bit like dropping a vase and expecting all the broken pieces to reform into a new lamp after it hits the ground.


So when I look at an evil person, I don't think "ugh, that person chose to do such awful things!". I think "Ugh, that fucking bug again. Can we get that patched already?!". And that's why I'd call myself a 'transhumanist'; these are problems of neurology, and to a lesser degree sociology. And the brain is mere atoms, and atoms can be changed. Atoms can be fixed. We just have to figure out the details.

And they're sure as hell not going to get fixed before that, either. It'd be nice if we stopped thinking that, but that's another bug so what can you do?

 

That’s true, and I believe that a morality system should be flexible for certain situations, or at the very least have exceptions. The problem of course is, is that the things you mention very specifically are conflicts in morality systems, where you do have to prioritize and decide for yourself what is the greatest wrong, and go with the least evil. The problem of course is that this is different for each individual person, and some people just go with what they believe is wrong even when they do it right. Now, what the story that started this discussion does mention, is that morality systems are based off of some purpose. You take some primal urge, and then you create a set of rules so that when that urge comes up, you can decide that something is wrong because it will hurt another person. And hurting another person is wrong because it will harm society / your happiness - due to the primal urge to sympathize with other people, etc... So the basis of human morality, of any human moral system, is to keep yourself and others happy. You prioritize your urges, relating reasons not to follow your destructive / harmful ones - those you consider “bad” in order to benefit those you consider “good”.

It’s sort of like an unwritten social contract, where you decide on a set of laws for yourself to follow when you decide that an action you do is right or wrong. You expect others to follow the same, or a similar social contract for the same reason that you expect others to follow the law, even if they are not caught breaking it.

Now, even if the law does not apply to someone in another country, if you believe it’s a good law to follow in their situation, you expect them to follow it. The problem is, that is displayed in the original story that started this conversation, that moral systems such as these have core values. In a lot of human moral systems, that core value is group happiness, which we generally agree leads to individual happiness, which we all have the primal urge to want, etc... In others it’s possibly enlightenment, in others, where I personally believe it makes less sense, is service to an outdated set of rules pointed out by a particular book, which was written originally likely as a book of law, used to keep those people feeling happy in general. For the purpose of my discussion of the story, I will use the core value of happiness, which is what the author seems to use.

Now, in the story as I read it, baby eating for the baby eaters is that core value. Their societies formed not for the purpose of making everyone happy, at least not directly, but for the purpose of eating more babies. Instead of wanting to be happy and to make others happy, what they want is to eat more babies. Their entire morality system is different and incompatible to ours, because the goal it ultimately serves is completely different. To us, when we make someone happy, we consider that by definition a “good deed”, and we share in their happiness. To them, that primal urge to make others happy, to reduce suffering in the world, is replaced by the urge to eat babies, to reduce the number of babies in the world. Notice, that by eating babies that urge is in fact directly contradictory to ours to make babies happy.

The Super Happy People on the other hand share in our urge to be happy. That part I find a bit less understandable, but it seems like the author argues that for the humans in his story, free will is just as important as happiness. That, or a little more understandably, the urge to feel sadness, hatred, and all those other emotions, us just as important as feeling happiness. The super happy people don’t have that urge. To them, those emotions are considered useless. They believe that those emotions are in fact the definition of “evil”. Their main goal, instead of being happy, but also some of the other emotions, could instead be stated to be never not feeling happy. To them, all those other emotions are useless, and only interfere with feeling happy. They are the result of all evil. Their system is built to prevent emotions, not to cause them. It is easier for them to argue what evil is, as opposed to what good is, unlike for humans. Their moral system interferes with ours because the entire point of their moral system is different from ours. To them, feeling those emotions that we do want to feel is evil, and should be stopped at all cost. It’s as if we ran into a group of cartoonishly evil aliens for whom the point of all society was to make people sad. They would literally do anything to keep people from being happy. To do this, they would kill families, massacre civilizations, etc... just to repress people. By our definition, they would essentially have the exact opposite moral system, no matter what ours was. We would want to kill them, simply because they oppose everything we value.

 

I would argue that intent matters. The point of morality is to have at least our purposeful actions be good. What you describe, I think, are subconscious evils, those we do without thinking, but based on urges. Perfect morality presupposes a perfectly logical mind, which isn’t the case, but moral rules are usually applied specifically to it. Morality helps decide for our conscious choices - what would be “evil” and what would be “good”. Even if we sometimes do unthinking evil, most people strive to consciously do good, or at least later regret doing evil when they notice it. And that is because we have a moral system to base those opinions on.

 

I don't really get that, in a sense.

If you can fix the "Bug", that's fine. Go ahead. But, if you can't, why keep the defective machine? However, then you have to decide where the line is, for, say, execution.

Complex.


On a related note, we're finding more and more is genetic. It's not 100%, but, well, the last study I read on IQ said it was 80% genes. There's also the "Warrior" genes, and a bunch of other things in our DNA.


However, there's also a fair amount of evidence that people can often channel tendencies in productive ways. A top corprate guy can be a Psychopath, and still very useful to society.


It makes hard and fast rules difficult.

 

Okay, now I'm actually getting intrigued by the mystery. This is all pretty weird.

It seems like this is a big enough conspiracy that only the Alignment government could be behind it, but they're doing everything in an extremely odd and roundabout way. My best guess is that there's something about War Hound creation that we're being deceived about, and they're trying to keep it quiet. If they're going so far as to eliminate even Hounds who have switched back to regular bodies then the threat can only be something in their heads. Some sort of information.

All right, I have a theory. Wherever War Hounds come from, they are not made using orphan children like the Alignment claim. They're getting the brains from somewhere else, and they're afraid that if War Hounds spend enough time back in civilian society they'll overcome the memory loss and remember who they used to be. Of course, I'm a bit at a loss as to what is considered *worse* than using orphaned children... maybe political dissidents? Aliens? I don't- No, I do know!

Engaging in slavery. They keep mentioning that as the threshold for Green Lantern intervention. And if they are kidnapping adults who have committed no crime, wiping their brains, and turning them into War Hounds... well, that's pretty much slavery.

What do you think, have I cracked the mystery just a bit before the story got there?

 

It's been a while since I read that particular story, but I don't think that was correct. They ate their babies because they used an r reproductive strategy and had adopted canibalism as a way of keeping their own population in check. Since they didn't feel an emotional bond with particular offspring, eating them was just efficient. When the humans brought up the idea of reducing their reproduction rate or at the very least killing their babies before eating them they were culture shocked, but were at least prepared to talk about it.

Unfortunately, the Super Happy People decided to murder them before we find out if they could be persuaded.

In this story, Xalitan Xor's values are fairly similar to the values many human cultures have espoused... And occasionally even followed. Even in his own society, those values are theoretically held to be goods.

 

EDIT: I'm removing my reply because it's in a discussion that a mod said to take elsewhere. I saw that AFTER I replied. Sorry mods.

 

You remember incorrectly. The story went into great detail to describe how the babies are known and loved and how the eater is capable of feeling the suffering as the baby is being digested. The Baby Eaters considered this to be a noble act of selflessness on the eater's part, enduring this pain and sadness for the sake of the greater good. The description you're remembering is what the Super Happy Fun people had proposed as a solution that (on paper) would satisfy the moral codes of all three civilizations.

 

Sooooo......

 

I have no idea who those people are.

 

One of them is right on the front page.

 

For those curious, that's Wynnde that Kaldur is kissing.

And to show how YJ writers feel free to shake things up, in the comics Wynnde would be about 50 thousand years to old for Kaldur, being one of Arion's pre-deluge pals.

 

Oooh, now I kinda recognize him. So I guess this is after another timeskip or something? He looks older.

 

Things could've gone better for Canis if Season 3 had come out sooner.

...No pun intended.

 

Forget Canis. Kaldur could have saved Paul-dur!

 

After reading the wiki-page I'm kind of questioning Kaldur's taste. I mean, I guess a lot can happen in more than five years, but if I knew you were a neo-nazi at some point in your life, to the point that you might have been involved in hate or terrorists attacks, that would probably paint any of my future interactions with you in a bad color.

On the other hand, I'm glad the guy got over Tula. All that situation was kind of sad for him.

 

Well it's true, being a water Deatheater isn't a good look on anyone, but I get the impression it's an actually repentant former water Deatheater in this case. People can change.

Although now I'm picturing that story idea I had once- a character from DC Universe Online making their way to YJ.

"Really, Orm, you decided you'd take over Atlantis from your brother by cribbing off of the bad guy from Harry Potter? Really? You're better than this, dude."

 

I'm pretty sure that he isn't better than this.

 

But the Orm from DC Universe Online is, hence this hypothetical super's surprise at Aquamort.

In DC Universe Online, Ocean Master is openly a supervillain who schemes to take the throne of Atlantis, but he's still a prince of Atlantis and Aquaman's brother.

For example, a crazy extremist takes over Atlantis and seemingly killed Aquaman in one episode, Mera and Ocean Master worked together to fight him.

YJ Ocean Master would probably try to join the lunatic's regime and weasel his way to power after throwing a massive party at Aquaman's death of course, from the impression I've gotten of him.

The point of the fic in my mind was the juxtaposition of how things are similar and how they are different between the two universes.