The Rotifer Archive: Miscellaneous Essays


I'm Starting to Think

You know the thing where if you run out into the middle of the street you could die in an instant, and running out into the middle of the street is stupid, but because it's stupid doesn't mean it's good for people to die from it? I'm starting to think that there's nothing so stupid or evil that the same principle doesn't apply, on some like....... pipe-dream utopian but emotionally meaningful and important level. Like how it's incommensurate with the vastness and awfulness of death that running out in the middle of the street can kill you, so even though the consequences were predictable it's meaningful to say they weren't deserved? I think it's incommensurate with the vastness and awfulness of death that someone making a premeditated and calculated plan to kill someone can result in that someone's death, and it's incommensurate with the vastness and awfulness of having-killed-someone that making a premeditated and calculated plan to kill someone can result in you killing that person. I think if we are willing to say "the fault lies with the way the world is that made this possible" then on some level that's true of any possible evil. If we are such that we will hurt each other we should not have been put in a position to do so no matter how clearly it was our decision or how hard we tried to hurt each other. Those people shouldn't have been on the trolley tracks in the first place? ok. rapists and murderers should not have existed in this broken universe in which it is possible to rape and murder people. And this principle is worthless for real-life decision making and practical ethics but like... watch Orange is the New Black until you understand this emotion and then we can talk about real-life decision making and practical ethics.


The Oldest and Most Enduring Prejudice

There’s a Mel Baggs may sie rest in peace post about how ableism is the oldest and most enduring form of prejudice because any other victim of any other kind of prejudice is happy to throw neurodivergent people under the bus via assimilationism, “at the end of the day we’re just like you” as if not being just like you would make oppression okay. And my first thought when I heard that take was that yeah it’s on the right track but there’s another argument people retreat to even after they consider themselves too enlightened for “at the end of the day we’re just like you” which is “we’re not hurting anyone”

And obviously the difference between someone who is not doing bad things and someone who is doing bad things is very real and very big and very morally important but like. I am pretty sure there has been a level of genuinely vile prejudice and oppression, fought back against both with “at the end of the day we’re just like you” and “we’re not hurting anyone”, which would still be wrong to subject people to even if those people have genuinely done very bad things

In that sense the oldest and most enduring prejudice is the prejudice against the genuinely evil


how are you gonna stop a monkey that bumped its head from dying

(On whether it's ethical to eat a monkey that died of natural causes:)

hmmmmmmm. hmm. i think it’s broadly agreed that it’s cromulent for humans to have preferences about how their bodies are treated after death that it’s morally better to respect than not, and i don’t know of a reason such preferences would be less worthy of respect if non-human animals had them, so i guess the question is do monkeys care about what happens to their corpses? i feel like probably not? i have heard rumors of elephants having rituals around the treatment of their dead, burying them in leafy branches or something like that, so it might be unethical to eat an elephant that this happens to. if elephants care about other elephants treating their corpses properly after they die. i guess also if it upsets the other elephants to not be able to bury their dead but in the absence of erstwhile preferences on the part of the dead elephant to me that seems like a less big deal, idk. i have a fairly strong moral intuition that the ethics of nonstandard disposal of a body should be much more about what the body’s identity would have wanted than the community that the body exists in. ← atomized neoliberal individualist. but perhaps the dynamic between a human and an elephant community is necessarily so different than the dynamic between a human and another human community that this is not a cromulent analogy, for any number of devilish reasons hiding out in the details. i certainly find it much easier to imagine a human-human friendship in which one of the understood tenets is that the survivor may eat the body of the first to die, no matter what the dead one’s family or community says, than any kind of human-elephant relationship with such a tenet! so perhaps if animals seem to ritualize the treatment of their dead at all we should not eat their naturally-dead even if we cannot strictly infer that the naturally-dead animal in question would have preferred us not to. but that is all proof-of-concept for eating a naturally-dead nonhuman animal of some species or other being unethical, it does not necessarily apply to monkeys at all. perhaps there are monkeys that have rituals around the treatment of their dead but i have heard no attestations of such. and on the other hand perhaps there are other ways of inferring a preference for what happens to one’s body after one’s death in the mind of a non-human animal, or arguments for treating it as the null hypothesis among non-human animals or monkeys in particular, that i have not thought of, but this post is getting long and one cannot say everything intelligent about a question oneself.

n. e. way i didnt vote in the poll but those are some thoughts about it.