Kino's Journey: A Peaceful Land

[Fianna]

The thing here is, both sides seem to have accepted the fact that they're never going to be able to get what they want, that the other side's military capacity will always be a match for theirs, and that warfare between the two will always end in a stalemate. Even this replacement for traditional war they've come up with only provides the winner with a year's worth of bragging rights, nothing more. They seem to have written off actually claiming the disputed territory or dealing a serious blow to their enemy as things that are simply never going to happen.

[Riedquat]

The thing here is, both sides seem to have accepted the fact that they're never going to be able to get what they want, that the other side's military capacity will always be a match for theirs, and that warfare between the two will always end in a stalemate. Even this replacement for traditional war they've come up with only provides the winner with a year's worth of bragging rights, nothing more. They seem to have written off actually claiming the disputed territory or dealing a serious blow to their enemy as things that are simply never going to happen.

And if they're prepared to accept that reality and not actually fight each other they'd be just as prepared for a non-bloodthirsty alternative. It still comes back to they've either got enough motivation to fight each other for real or they haven't.

It's a bit odd for an anti-war message to miss the key difference between war and a game, when "war isn't a game" is such a common anti-war message.

[Thebestoftherest]

The thing here is, both sides seem to have accepted the fact that they're never going to be able to get what they want, that the other side's military capacity will always be a match for theirs, and that warfare between the two will always end in a stalemate. Even this replacement for traditional war they've come up with only provides the winner with a year's worth of bragging rights, nothing more. They seem to have written off actually claiming the disputed territory or dealing a serious blow to their enemy as things that are simply never going to happen.

And if they're prepared to accept that reality and not actually fight each other they'd be just as prepared for a non-bloodthirsty alternative. It still comes back to they've either got enough motivation to fight each other for real or they haven't.

It's a bit odd for an anti-war message to miss the key difference between war and a game, when "war isn't a game" is such a common anti-war message.

That the point the people are so used to war they try to turn it into something less ugly as oppose to admit they did wrong and are still doing wrong.

[Formless One]

Not sure that that answers my criticism at all.

Whatever the reasons countries go to war it's still one side being prepared to kill to get what they want, and another side being prepared to kill to stop them. But the same thing can happen on all sorts of scales, but with pretty much the same motivation. An armed robber might kill to rob, and people will be prepared to kill to stop him. But if you get a shootout between robbers and police an alternative of "let's see who can go and kill the most bystanders instead" isn't going to cut it any more than "let's have a game of football to decide whether you'll be arrested or go free." Even if it happens the loser will still resort to violence if they were prepared to do so in the first place rather than just accept the outcome.

The issue is that you are assuming all wars are fought because of rational motivations, but a quick reading of history proves that isn't true at all. Look no further than World War One, its fucking nuts just how insipid the justifications for the war were. But in the context of the 19'th century-- hell, the entire medieval period even-- shows it was actually just the last war of its kind (or second to last, depending on how you read the Nazi's motivations for starting WWII). What you are forgetting to account for is the motivation of revenge. One nation loses, but they weren't crippled completely because total war is an exception rather than the rule in history. Years or decades later, their population and their rulers don't forget that, and as soon as they have their strength back they want to go to war for no other reason except to hurt the people who hurt them, no matter how flimsy the excuse is. Given enough time, and this can lead to national hatreds or rivalries.

European history is replete with examples of wars that make no sense under the paradigm you propose, but it made perfect sense to people at the time because the official casus belli was a white lie and everyone on both sides knew it. They had so thoroughly Other-ed their rival nations that aside from an overall sense that Europeans were somehow superior to non-Europeans, the English thought they were superior to the French, the French to the Germans, the Germans to the Russians, and so forth. British propaganda from World War One outright caricatures the Germans with racist stereotypes that would make any modern Brit blush if they saw it, and its only because of the world wars and political movements to end war and racism that a lot of this has come to be seen for the stupidity that it is. But back then? Well, how else do you explain that the Hundred Years War literally lasted that long? By the time it ended no one who was born at the beginning of the war was still alive to tell how all the nonsense started! They had to read history books to find out! Cultural inertia, national rivalry, and the fact that war couldn't actually solve the underlying dispute no matter how many people took a sword to the gut is the real thing that kept the farce going for so long. Rational thought had little to do with it.

And its not like this trend has completely stopped either. Look at the conflicts that took place in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union in countries like Yugoslavia and Bosnia. Sure, the economic and political problems caused by the fall of the Soviets was the immediate cause, but that in itself does not explain the war crimes and the genocides that happened there. All of that was caused by long standing ethnic tensions that have existed there for hundreds of years for reasons that don't make rational sense (especially to an outsider), but make sense to the people who live there. Tensions that the Soviet Union suppressed when it was in power, because obviously it had a stake in its citizens not killing each other for nonsensical reasons. A nation is only as rational as the people it is comprised of, and people can be very irrational indeed. You can't even expect them to act in their own best interest, because there are other factors that manipulate the mind into prioritizing other things. Like why the hell is everyone hoarding toilet paper right now rather than spending their money on things that will actually help keep them from getting sick? Who knows? The answer must lie in some irrational impulse that has gone viral (no pandemic pun intended).

I am not as well acquainted with Asian history as I am with European history, and of course that is important because Kino's Journey is a Japanese work, but I know for a fact that a similar trend exists there because of the notorious mutual contempt Japanese and Koreans have or have had for each other throughout history. Even now the Japanese hold racist opinions of Koreans, and Koreans have hardly forgotten their treatment by the Japanese during World War II. Its easy for an outsider to look at that and say that its all hogwash and they should forget the whole thing, but that's forgetting that there are still some Koreans alive who could tell you the horrible stories of things they witnessed first hand. Human instinct may not be for war per-say, but punitive action against those you perceive to have wronged you or those you care about? I think that's harder to dismiss.

[AllanO]

The issue is that you are assuming all wars are fought because of rational motivations, but a quick reading of history proves that isn't true at all. Look no further than World War One, its fucking nuts just how insipid the justifications for the war were. But in the context of the 19'th century-- hell, the entire medieval period even-- shows it was actually just the last war of its kind (or second to last, depending on how you read the Nazi's motivations for starting WWII). What you are forgetting to account for is the motivation of revenge. One nation loses, but they weren't crippled completely because total war is an exception rather than the rule in history. Years or decades later, their population and their rulers don't forget that, and as soon as they have their strength back they want to go to war for no other reason except to hurt the people who hurt them, no matter how flimsy the excuse is. Given enough time, and this can lead to national hatreds or rivalries.

I think your mixing up two things. One is that wars are fought for motivations we think of as petty, factually wrong or even morally abhorrent, revenge, pride, racial supremacy, belief in divine right etc. but that is a question of ends, the means then used to pursue those ends could be very rational, ie well designed to achieve goals set up by those motives.

The kind of irrationality Riedquat finds implausible is about means. It is about choosing methods to pursue goals that seem totally ineffective if not counter productive to the supposed goals. I can't kill you so I'm going to kill your brother to be revenged on you makes a certain amount of sense though it is clearly at least somewhat arbitrary, I'm going to kill some random person you know and care nothing about and go out of my way not to hurt you is a completely ineffective means to the end of revenge (hurting you), its a short step away from I'm going to get revenge against you by becoming your indentured servant for life and catering to your every whim.

All rules of war are in some sense arbitrary restrictions on achieving the goals of the war yet still consummate the ends that drive people to war and so one might imagine piling them on top of each other until one has a completely arbitrary method of waging war that is completely ineffective that somehow satisfies the drives for war. You can imagine it as an extrapolation from what people do, but that does not make it realistic. In real cases the methods may be arbitrarily restricted but they still allow the achievement of some of the objectives at least temporarily; they are not purely arbitrary methods.

The only goals that are achieved by the massacres in the Peaceful land are sublimating (redirecting) blood lust and demonstrating strength of arms. There is no indication either side acknowledges the others strength of arms in the exercise (they don't go "ooh we don't want to piss them off they are so good at massacring innocent civilians that could be us next") which is the closer to the kind of rationale Riedquat and others are searching for (ie that would make it a clear means to some end like discouraging further violence), so the ignoring it as a factor (arguably its implicit in the setup) compounds the sense that it is an unrealistic unmotivated scenario. The lack of such pragmatic benchmarks suggests desires for revenge and territory have been completely abandoned . In terms of redirecting bloodlust that seems more explicit (they all seem to really enjoy the killing), but it is awfully well contained the soldiers don't go home and kill their neighbours or spouses etc. when they have a spat. Conversely the indigenous people getting massacred are redirecting their blood lust at random travelers but that is arbitrary and unfocused, they don't contain that by arbitrary rules one gets the impression they may take it out on each other as much as random travelers.

It is too bad and hard to understand why the warring nations who seem so able to arbitrarily and effectively sublimate their bloodlust can't just sublimate it slightly differently by killing farm animals or beating up training dummies or something else. That they are so precisely moldable in their motivations but yet can't make that final useful move is another way it is unbelievable. As pointed out if they can do all this why not the extra step of declaring an eternal truce, if there actions are so completely arbitrary and unrestricted by any actual goal.

To my mind a big part of Kino's journey has been traveling from one society to the next where they take an idea and run with it to a ludicrous extreme (a few escape this). So on one level a society that so codifies war as to make it completely arbitrary as it continues to be horrific strikes me as in the same vein as imaging a society where they discover the means to induce telepathy and everyone just signs up without any long term testing or considering the consequences. However I would not say any of the monomaniacal societies in Kino's Journey are realistic. They are an exploration of a theme or idea by taking it to an extreme, but that is different from being a realistic exploration.

[Formless One]

I think your mixing up two things. One is that wars are fought for motivations we think of as petty, factually wrong or even morally abhorrent, revenge, pride, racial supremacy, belief in divine right etc. but that is a question of ends, the means then used to pursue those ends could be very rational, ie well designed to achieve goals set up by those motives.

The kind of irrationality Riedquat finds implausible is about means. It is about choosing methods to pursue goals that seem totally ineffective if not counter productive to the supposed goals. I can't kill you so I'm going to kill your brother to be revenged on you makes a certain amount of sense though it is clearly at least somewhat arbitrary, I'm going to kill some random person you know and care nothing about and go out of my way not to hurt you is a completely ineffective means to the end of revenge (hurting you), its a short step away from I'm going to get revenge against you by becoming your indentured servant for life and catering to your every whim.

Except that the argument is based on an assumption that there can be a rational means to achieve an irrational end. But that does not follow; if the end itself is irrational, then there can be no rational analysis of the means to achieve that goal, and in fact no rational means of achieving it may even exist. That's a part of the premise to both A Peaceful Land and A Taste of Armageddon, the means of fighting the war seems rational on the surface, but because the war itself is irrational then in fact the whole thing is a farce. I brought up the idea of revenge because it is well known that revenge tends to beget more revenge, so any war or fight based on that motive is self defeating. The method of waging it is not relevant to the analysis.

So if the main driver for the war has shifted from a dispute over territory to a national rivalry, it could well be that proxy war would superficially make sense to both sides. But the point of the episodes is that any sense it appears to make is entirely superficial. It isn't even a war anymore, Kino says as much. Its a yearly massacre done out of national pride by both sides, because neither side really cares about the lives of the indigenous people in between them, but they have come to consider the lives of their own citizens too precious to risk in an actual conflict. It reverses the logic of A Taste of Armageddon, where the physical culture and infrastructure of the planet was considered priceless, but the people's lives were so cheap that their names had serial numbers in them. And yet the conclusions are similar: because their priorities are screwed up, their war will never end and the suffering will never end.

Look for comparison at the third episode, where the first kingdom Kino visits ends up going to war with the third kingdom she visits. Kino and the audience know that the actual cause of the war is a misunderstanding, but she never says that the first kingdom's decision is irrational, unlike her condemnation of the massacre in A Peaceful Land. Because that kingdom may have made a choice and it may have even been the wrong choice, but they were at least willing to risk their own people for a cause she could comprehend. When you believe the world will end if you don't do something, then action to prevent that is, in some sense, necessarily rational. If you are too prideful and fearful to admit that your actions are pointless and cruel, that's irrational and immoral. Do you see the distinction the show is making here?

I think the reason A Taste of Armageddon chose the kind of limited warfare that it did was both because its a great sci-fi premise, and because it serves to hilight the kinds of things its author believes to be less important than peace. Kino's Journey chooses its form of limited war by taking the idea of proxy war and distilling it down to its essence in order to highlight the fundamental immorality of it. Even the natives trying to kill Kino is just a consequence of that inherent immorality, as their killing is not about bloodlust like you say, but rather the natives trying to take out their frustrations on someone they think is weaker than them, because if they could take it out on those who have been murdering them this problem wouldn't exist. Its a part of the cycle of violence that isn't often pointed out, but its there. For instance, to take this away from the realm of international politics, one of the biggest risk factors for becoming a bully is being bullied. People in that situation seek an outlet, and know from first hand experience that victimizing others feels empowering to the victimizer. Kino turning the tables on them is important to the episode because it not only makes a moral distinction between them and her, but also because it highlights an unstated fact about the true source of all this violence. Keep in mind that she pulled her revolver, and a revolver only has six shots. There were far more than six people attacking her, but with only one shot everyone stopped what they were doing and then fled. Like the kingdoms themselves, they individually valued their lives so much that as soon as they faced someone who could easily kill any one of them, the whole group did the irrational thing and ran. Thus we are shown that the true root of violence is, ironically, cowardice.

And that's the thing about Kino's Journey that I think is great and which I think some people have failed to notice. The story isn't supposed to be realistic, or at least not in the sense you're expecting it to be. You guys seem to be expecting realism in the world building, but since Kino isn't a space traveler there is a massive hole in her world's logic you could drive Hermes through. No kingdom interacts with any other kingdom outside the episode (or chapter of the book) that it is introduced in, so that the implications of one kingdom having supercomputers that organize all of their society is never brought up when Kino arrives at a kingdom that doesn't even have airplanes yet (which is apparently most of them). However, the stories are still meant to be logical insofar as they take the premise of any one chapter and explore the philosophical implications of each scenario to the fullest, and let the audience decide what the real world analogy is supposed to be. So for example, bloodlust is brought up in this story so that it can create a smokescreen that the kingdoms hide behind as an excuse for continuing this tradition of killing, but when the natives kill they don't try to convince themselves its about anything less than bullying others to make themselves feel better. They are there once again to help bring the logic of the situation fully into the light, stripped of the pretensions of the powerful groups in the story because its logical that the powerful would present the situation in a light as favorable to their conclusions as possible. Kino of course is an outsider, and quite inoculated against the bullshit of the powerful kingdoms so that she is sympathetic to the less powerful group... just not to the point where she will let them end her journey prematurely. It is, after all, her story.

[Riedquat]

I think your mixing up two things. One is that wars are fought for motivations we think of as petty, factually wrong or even morally abhorrent, revenge, pride, racial supremacy, belief in divine right etc. but that is a question of ends, the means then used to pursue those ends could be very rational, ie well designed to achieve goals set up by those motives.

The kind of irrationality Riedquat finds implausible is about means. It is about choosing methods to pursue goals that seem totally ineffective if not counter productive to the supposed goals. I can't kill you so I'm going to kill your brother to be revenged on you makes a certain amount of sense though it is clearly at least somewhat arbitrary, I'm going to kill some random person you know and care nothing about and go out of my way not to hurt you is a completely ineffective means to the end of revenge (hurting you), its a short step away from I'm going to get revenge against you by becoming your indentured servant for life and catering to your every whim.

Except that the argument is based on an assumption that there can be a rational means to achieve an irrational end. But that does not follow; if the end itself is irrational, then there can be no rational analysis of the means to achieve that goal, and in fact no rational means of achieving it may even exist. That's a part of the premise to both A Peaceful Land and A Taste of Armageddon, the means of fighting the war seems rational on the surface, but because the war itself is irrational then in fact the whole thing is a farce. I brought up the idea of revenge because it is well known that revenge tends to beget more revenge, so any war or fight based on that motive is self defeating. The method of waging it is not relevant to the analysis.

I don't agree with that at all.

It's all psychological really - someone is motivated strongly enough about something to do something extreme to get it. It doesn't really matter in the slightest how "rational" that motivation is, the only relevant fact is that if they're driven enough to go to that extreme in the first place they're not going to accept no for an answer, short of being forced not to. Sure, you can call the whole thing bonkers but you're not going to convince me that anyone prepared to kill to get something, and prepared to risk being killed to get it, will accept the result of a toss of a coin instead. If they lose that toss of a coin they'll just go back to trying to kill.

Also, how do you distinguish between a rational and irrational end anyway? That requires universal acceptance of values and desires, and there's no such thing. All there are are desires that are fairly common, but the universe couldn't care less. Fundamentally it matters not in the slightest whether you live or die, the only way the "live" choice is more "rational" is because we happen to have that built-in desire to live. It's all in the context of whatever we happen to desire; I'd argue it only becomes unambiguously irrational when we're engaged in a course of action that we think stands a chance of satisfying our desires but is more likely to achieve the opposite.

[Darth Wedgius]

I think there is a sticking point of sorts. It isn't the idea of war by other means we find distasteful, it's the means. I think that if the warring sides decided to work their conflict out with thumb wrestling or coin flips, we'd probably see it as odd, and maybe unlikely to work, but not wrong.

Instead they choose to shoot up defenseless people. It's not really the conflict we object to; it's the lack of compassion towards people who aren't doing anything to deserve to be treated that way.

There's probably an anti-war message here, but I think it got a little muddled. Maybe it's how the people that run the wars generally aren't the ones who suffer.

Did the episode explain why the villagers don't, um, move? Is farming land really so expensive that making a killing in real estate is no longer metaphorical?

[Formless One]

I don't agree with that at all.

It's all psychological really - someone is motivated strongly enough about something to do something extreme to get it. It doesn't really matter in the slightest how "rational" that motivation is, the only relevant fact is that if they're driven enough to go to that extreme in the first place they're not going to accept no for an answer, short of being forced not to. Sure, you can call the whole thing bonkers but you're not going to convince me that anyone prepared to kill to get something, and prepared to risk being killed to get it, will accept the result of a toss of a coin instead. If they lose that toss of a coin they'll just go back to trying to kill.

You are confusing two different things; goals and motivations are related, but not the same thing. An emotion can be a motive because it can inspire action, but a goal is by definition a specific end state that you are trying to achieve. In fact, many times a person will act irrationally specifically because they are acting on emotion without any goal whatsoever, they just haven't thought that far ahead. Indeed, impulsivity is one of the diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (aka sociopathy). But whole communities can act impulsively as well, or act on an emotion without a concrete goal-- especially if there are different opinions in the community about what goals they should be pursuing, but no disagreement about the course of action they should be taking. "We need to do something, this is something, therefor this is what we should be doing" is very tempting logic, even if its not valid.

Also, how do you distinguish between a rational and irrational end anyway? That requires universal acceptance of values and desires, and there's no such thing. All there are are desires that are fairly common, but the universe couldn't care less. Fundamentally it matters not in the slightest whether you live or die, the only way the "live" choice is more "rational" is because we happen to have that built-in desire to live. It's all in the context of whatever we happen to desire; I'd argue it only becomes unambiguously irrational when we're engaged in a course of action that we think stands a chance of satisfying our desires but is more likely to achieve the opposite.

And I have to disagree in turn. This is just trite nihilism and I have faith that 99.99% of the human population would find that argument fishy at best, even if they lacked the philosophical training to spot the logical holes in it.

*sigh* This is going to take some explaining.

This idea seems to be a misunderstanding of thinkers like David Hume, and a common one; after all, the Logical Positivists put a lot of stock into misrepresenting Hume for their own dumb reasons. Hume's Is/Ought distinction was supposed to mean two things: one is that you cannot derive Is from Ought because that violates logic and common sense (if the world was how it is supposed to be, ethics would be a pointless endeavor, but only a few philosophers were willing to make that argument). But that isn't to say you can't do the reverse; Hume was merely disappointed that so many thinkers made the jump from Is to Ought without sufficiently justifying themselves; a sign of lazy thinking. He himself proposed arguments for deriving Ought from Is such as proposing criteria for what makes a judge fair and unbiased. Such an argument requires us to grant that facts about human psychology are relevant to what is objectively valuable. However, in Hume's time psychology wasn't yet considered a science, so the Positivists (who invented whole cloth the idea of "Hard" vs "Soft" sciences) misunderstood this to mean that ethics was walled off from science and the realm of "rational" studies, like math. In fact, like medicine all psychological knowledge is value laden. Hell, I would go so far as to say that knowledge itself is value laden; we seek it for reasons that are fundamental to our nature as human beings, not because it has cosmic value. We seek out knowledge in order to satisfy curiosity-- an emotional motivation!-- and for its secondary benefits, such as technology, health, showing off to your friends, etc. After all, what does the universe care if you can prove that 1+1=2? When you frame it that way, it becomes obvious that we should not be thinking of the Universe as a deity that has an opinion on our existence and way of living. The meaning of all these terms, all these concepts, comes from us alone because we are the ones with minds to comprehend them with.

So I take an Aristotelian/Existential and pragmatic view of ethics. What is good? Just survey the human population for the most common needs and wants and start from there. Follow the logic of any given desire to its ultimate cause, the motivation behind the motivation if you will, and treat achieving that end as the goal of ethics itself. For Aristotle, that end was happiness, and why not. Though that might not be the only end goal, as there is nothing saying there is only one ultimate cause of our behavior. We also want to survive; why consider that irrational, when death is the last thing a human being will ever do? As far as I'm concerned, any statement like "it doesn't matter whether you live or die" is necessarily false, as your death has an effect on everyone and everything whether you realize it or not. If we could abolish death, we should, but tragically that's impossible. So we at least seek to avoid unnecessary death or premature death or preventable deaths. That is good; to inflict death and suffering without a token attempt to create some Good in exchange? Its just common sense that should be considered evil. Common sense isn't always wrong.

You might argue that this is exactly the same as what you said, but the one difference is that under my account of it, not all emotional desires are good. Some are evil, because there is no indication that actions made in defiance of other people's will to live or desire to be happy actually benefits the sociopath. Can revenge ever actually be satisfied? Can bloodlust ever actually be slated? I don't think so. I think Aristotle was correct to identify some things as vices, which are harmful not only to others but to oneself. It is possible to become something less than human.

Did the episode explain why the villagers don't, um, move? Is farming land really so expensive that making a killing in real estate is no longer metaphorical?

There is a phenomenon in psychology we call "learned helplessness". Its exactly what it sounds like. If you expose an animal to an inescapable situation over and over again where no matter what they do they will suffer, eventually they just give up and stop trying to find ways out of the situation. Even if an opportunity presents itself, they won't bother. They have learned to be helpless. Now, human beings are more psychologically complicated than the rats that this phenomenon was first demonstrated in, but that doesn't mean we are immune to it. It just means we have enough self awareness to identify the behavior. Actually deciding you won't be helpless anymore still takes mental effort because you have to retrain all the bad habits keeping you stuck, plus in many cases you have to learn new skills in order to actually leave. For instance, to escape a war zone you need to learn how to travel, and fast. You need to learn how to survive while on the run. You need to learn how to cross borders into areas where you may not be wanted by the locals. If you have children and other dependents you have to choose to either leave them behind or find ways of supporting them while on the run. You may even need to learn how to defend yourself from other people (like the ones invading your home). You may die while trying to learn these things. Given that, many people just give up, and create elaborate mental strategies to excuse their decision to stay. For instance, some may say they are staying out of pride, but its just the helplessness talking. Others may fall prey to the same cognitive traps that gamblers fall into, but with much higher stakes if they lose the bet. Given how much Kino's Journey emphasizes the risks of becoming a traveler, I don't see it as unrealistic at all for these people to have chosen to stay despite the yearly massacre. Some probably have left; we're seeing the ones who think its easier to stay, and use violence to ease the cognitive dissonance of knowing they really should evacuate. That last part might be the most dubious aspect of this, actually, but then remember that Kino could be seen by them watching the massacre with a front row seat. So they know that she, and probably many other travelers in the area, were there doing absolutely nothing to save them. Its little wonder her attempts to empathize with them fall on deaf ears.

[Riedquat]

You are confusing two different things; goals and motivations are related, but not the same thing. An emotion can be a motive because it can inspire action, but a goal is by definition a specific end state that you are trying to achieve. In fact, many times a person will act irrationally specifically because they are acting on emotion without any goal whatsoever, they just haven't thought that far ahead. Indeed, impulsivity is one of the diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (aka sociopathy). But whole communities can act impulsively as well, or act on an emotion without a concrete goal-- especially if there are different opinions in the community about what goals they should be pursuing, but no disagreement about the course of action they should be taking. "We need to do something, this is something, therefor this is what we should be doing" is very tempting logic, even if its not valid.

And thus you've still got motivation. Whether or not you or I think they're flawed, irrational or pointless is an entirely separate issue.

And I have to disagree in turn. This is just trite nihilism and I have faith that 99.99% of the human population would find that argument fishy at best, even if they lacked the philosophical training to spot the logical holes in it.

Lots of people find thingss fishy - an appeal to the masses isn't convincing.

*sigh* This is going to take some explaining.

<snip for brevity>
To that I'm afraid all I can say is "so what?" You're quoting someone else's philosophy rather than making an argument.

So I take an Aristotelian/Existential and pragmatic view of ethics. What is good? Just survey the human population for the most common needs and wants and start from there. Follow the logic of any given desire to its ultimate cause, the motivation behind the motivation if you will, and treat achieving that end as the goal of ethics itself. For Aristotle, that end was happiness, and why not.

It works for us, and I generally take the point of view that if something doesn't ultimately bring happiness (or is a means to that end) I don't really see the point in doing it, but that's really by the by.

Though that might not be the only end goal, as there is nothing saying there is only one ultimate cause of our behavior. We also want to survive; why consider that irrational, when death is the last thing a human being will ever do? As far as I'm concerned, any statement like "it doesn't matter whether you live or die" is necessarily false, as your death has an effect on everyone and everything whether you realize it or not.

Why does that make it false? You die, things happen, sure. But whether it matters or not is only within the context of what we happen to feel matters. I regard it as a pragmatic view to seek out happiness but there's no absolute truth or otherwise in doing so - believing there is strikes me as rather egocentric.

If we could abolish death, we should, but tragically that's impossible. So we at least seek to avoid unnecessary death or premature death or preventable deaths. That is good; to inflict death and suffering without a token attempt to create some Good in exchange? Its just common sense that should be considered evil. Common sense isn't always wrong.

Sure, that works from our own perspective, one that's evolved to avoid death because of the logical consequence that a species that doesn't (or has some other means of dealing with it en masse) isn't going to survive and evolve to where it is now.

You might argue that this is exactly the same as what you said, but the one difference is that under my account of it, not all emotional desires are good. Some are evil, because there is no indication that actions made in defiance of other people's will to live or desire to be happy actually benefits the sociopath. Can revenge ever actually be satisfied? Can bloodlust ever actually be slated? I don't think so. I think Aristotle was correct to identify some things as vices, which are harmful not only to others but to oneself. It is possible to become something less than human.

I might share your view on that but there's no basis of claiming it is anything more than a commonly shared value, which has happened to evolve because it happens to work to help keep the species going. Unfortunately though there is plenty of evidence that violent, murderous acts can bring benefits to a group even though it's at the expense of others, defining "benefit" as "gives us what we want."