If humanity was put on trial by an advanced race of aliens, how would you defend humanity and argue

[Chrisinmd]

If humanity was put on trial by an advanced race of aliens, would you be able to defend humanity and argue for its continued existence?

Or would you be unable to defend humanity's actions and just plead guilty as charged?

 

[Dirty Dog]

I'd be in favor of conviction for a significant portion of the population...

 

[Argus]

I would question the entire premise of the question.

It presumes:
1) That an advanced Alien race has obtained moral superiority
2) That a morally superior race would justify "punishing" humanity for it's sins by inflicting mass genocide upon it.

It implies:
3) That humanity's sins out-weigh its good
4) That humanity is not consistently striving to better itself
5) That good can exist without bad, or that peace can exist without struggle
6) That the height of achievement of some advanced civilization would be characterized by authoritarian judgement and genocidal retribution inflicted upon anyone not worthy of existence in their view.

I would argue that all of the above are false, and that any truly advanced civilization would hopefully recognize natural laws, and most likely leave us to either suffer our own folly, or to learn from it and proceed to more advanced forms of folly, and recognize that this is just the natural order of things.

To some extent, I do feel that humanity is doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, because we really don't learn from History. Or, rather, only a rather insignificant number of us do, while the rest are all too keen to support backwards and destructive ideologies in the name of some perceived justice every time someone comes along and tells us that we're entitled to something and that we should take it from this other group over here who is distinctly "different" and at odds with us, perhaps to the point of being inhuman.

 

[_Simon_]

Haha you certainly come up with some great imaginative threads @Chrisinmd [emoji14]

 

[jobo]

If humanity was put on trial by an advanced race of aliens, would you be able to defend humanity and argue for its continued existence?

Or would you be unable to defend humanity's actions and just plead guilty as charged?

what are we being charged with, seems to matter
mankind, humans, homo sapiens, are ingenious monkeys and thats rather it

our social structures and " morals are not that far removed from a primative ancestors, l

our ability to do things ( good or bad")on a significant scale comes from our ingenuity, but doesnt at all change the fact that we are monkeys , a natral species b3ibg driven and controled mostly by factors out of our control, ie evolution

were are far from the first species to threaten the existance of other species, the evolutionary records are full of species that were out competed or had their habitat changed by a new kid on the block

we are also not the only species to wage war on our own kind with casuilties in the millions .

so what are we charged with that wouldnt equally apply to lots of other species past and present.

the evolution of photosynthesis, just about killed everything else including the photosynthetic life forms because of the abundance of oxygen they created, are trees similarly indited

 

[dvcochran]

I'd be in favor of conviction for a significant portion of the population...

Fully, fully agree.

I sometimes wonder if we are just seeing mother nature in action with this virus or things similar. I believe there is a natural tipping point to the population.

 

[dvcochran]

I would question the entire premise of the question.

It presumes:
1) That an advanced Alien race has obtained moral superiority
2) That a morally superior race would justify "punishing" humanity for it's sins by inflicting mass genocide upon it.

It implies:
3) That humanity's sins out-weigh its good
4) That humanity is not consistently striving to better itself
5) That good can exist without bad, or that peace can exist without struggle
6) That the height of achievement of some advanced civilization would be characterized by authoritarian judgement and genocidal retribution inflicted upon anyone not worthy of existence in their view.

I would argue that all of the above are false, and that any truly advanced civilization would hopefully recognize natural laws, and most likely leave us to either suffer our own folly, or to learn from it and proceed to more advanced forms of folly, and recognize that this is just the natural order of things.

To some extent, I do feel that humanity is doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, because we really don't learn from History. Or, rather, only a rather insignificant number of us do, while the rest are all too keen to support backwards and destructive ideologies in the name of some perceived justice every time someone comes along and tells us that we're entitled to something and that we should take it from this other group over here who is distinctly "different" and at odds with us, perhaps to the point of being inhuman.

Good sound TNG thinking101.

But you mostly lost me on that last paragraph. I think I agree with it but not certain. For clarity, would you please rephrase it for me?

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

I would question the entire premise of the question.

It presumes:
1) That an advanced Alien race has obtained moral superiority
2) That a morally superior race would justify "punishing" humanity for it's sins by inflicting mass genocide upon it.

It implies:
3) That humanity's sins out-weigh its good
4) That humanity is not consistently striving to better itself
5) That good can exist without bad, or that peace can exist without struggle
6) That the height of achievement of some advanced civilization would be characterized by authoritarian judgement and genocidal retribution inflicted upon anyone not worthy of existence in their view.

I would argue that all of the above are false, and that any truly advanced civilization would hopefully recognize natural laws, and most likely leave us to either suffer our own folly, or to learn from it and proceed to more advanced forms of folly, and recognize that this is just the natural order of things.

I agree that the question presumes/implies 1, 2 (Possibly) and 6. Not so much on 3/4/5. Admittedly 1,2 and 6 are enough to argue with the question, but going to address the others.

I'll look at modern society for those. Let's take a guy who is on trial for murdering someone (and he did commit the crime).

3) Does it matter how good of a guy he was outside of that? Even if he saved 5 lives in unrelated incidents, does that mean he gets to go free for the murder he committed, since objectively he did more net-good than bad in that aspect? Modern society says no.

4) So he admits to the murder, but shows how he's bettering himself. When it comes to minor crimes/misdemeanors that can work-showing how you're in therapy after hitting someone while going into a rage, or that X crime was a result of your addiction and now your in rehab, often as long as you continue with treatment and being monitored by probation, you can get out of it with no/minimal jail time (with a violation possibly resulting in going to jail). For a felony like murder this probably isn't going to happen in modern times, no matter how much you're improving.

5) So there's two ways to take this argument. A) The philosophical way that to have one thing it's opposite has to exist, and B) That struggle is the cause of bad things. I think you mean the first, but I'll address both.
A) This argument has flaws on it's own, and I'm probably going to do a bad job typing them out. Basically the argument goes that if murder is X bad, then saving someone from murder is X good (or more generally death is X bad and saving someone is X good). But you can't save someone without the bad thing existing in the first place.

There's a couple issues with this, but the main one is that it presumes that good and bad both have to be human caused/intentional. Looking at the above example, saving a life is pretty good in general. And murder is pretty bad in general. But an avalanche causing death is also bad. If there's an avalanche, I recognize it and save someone, that's still good, but man didn't need to commit bad. If someone's car goes over a cliff and into water because the mechanic messed up the breaks, and someone else jumped in and saved the person, the one guy did a lot of good, but I would argue (and this part is debatable) that the mechanic did less bad due to intent factoring in.

Keep in mind the above are specific/extreme examples, but that's not to say they're the only examples. I just used specificity to make the point. There's also a point that good and bad are relative, so even if both have to exist conceptually, we can shift the meanings of the terms. So if badness/goodness is on a scale of -10 to 10, I would put mass genocide as the -10. But if that never existed, -10 would still be there, but that would now be something like a serial killer, which on the first scale might be around a -8. So by doing more of what we consider good, and less of what we consider bad, we can effectively move the scale of bad vs. good.

B) To go back to the initial court case. The guy murdered someone and is now found guilty. His excuse is that he struggled a lot in life before that, making him 'hard', and impulsive. While that helps the jury/judge/people understand him better, it shouldn't mean that he no longer gets punished for the murder.

-------------
My last point is addressing 1,2 and 6 which I agree with you on. But the question itself leaves a bit of room for clarity. The assumption that we're making is that they're judging us by their intergalactic laws, and determining if we can stay. But what if the issue is actually a self-preservation one: Upon making contact, they see all the atrocities we as a group committed, and are now debating if they should eliminate us before we advance from their technology and do the same to them. That would be dystopian and hypocritical, but I could absolutely see some human's making that decision if they felt legitimately threatened by another group.

 

[dvcochran]

I agree that the question presumes/implies 1, 2 (Possibly) and 6. Not so much on 3/4/5. Admittedly 1,2 and 6 are enough to argue with the question, but going to address the others.

I'll look at modern society for those. Let's take a guy who is on trial for murdering someone (and he did commit the crime).

3) Does it matter how good of a guy he was outside of that? Even if he saved 5 lives in unrelated incidents, does that mean he gets to go free for the murder he committed, since objectively he did more net-good than bad in that aspect? Modern society says no.

4) So he admits to the murder, but shows how he's bettering himself. When it comes to minor crimes/misdemeanors that can work-showing how you're in therapy after hitting someone while going into a rage, or that X crime was a result of your addiction and now your in rehab, often as long as you continue with treatment and being monitored by probation, you can get out of it with no/minimal jail time (with a violation possibly resulting in going to jail). For a felony like murder this probably isn't going to happen in modern times, no matter how much you're improving.

5) So there's two ways to take this argument. A) The philosophical way that to have one thing it's opposite has to exist, and B) That struggle is the cause of bad things. I think you mean the first, but I'll address both.
A) This argument has flaws on it's own, and I'm probably going to do a bad job typing them out. Basically the argument goes that if murder is X bad, then saving someone from murder is X good (or more generally death is X bad and saving someone is X good). But you can't save someone without the bad thing existing in the first place.

There's a couple issues with this, but the main one is that it presumes that good and bad both have to be human caused/intentional. Looking at the above example, saving a life is pretty good in general. And murder is pretty bad in general. But an avalanche causing death is also bad. If there's an avalanche, I recognize it and save someone, that's still good, but man didn't need to commit bad. If someone's car goes over a cliff and into water because the mechanic messed up the breaks, and someone else jumped in and saved the person, the one guy did a lot of good, but I would argue (and this part is debatable) that the mechanic did less bad due to intent factoring in.

Keep in mind the above are specific/extreme examples, but that's not to say they're the only examples. I just used specificity to make the point. There's also a point that good and bad are relative, so even if both have to exist conceptually, we can shift the meanings of the terms. So if badness/goodness is on a scale of -10 to 10, I would put mass genocide as the -10. But if that never existed, -10 would still be there, but that would now be something like a serial killer, which on the first scale might be around a -8. So by doing more of what we consider good, and less of what we consider bad, we can effectively move the scale of bad vs. good.

B) To go back to the initial court case. The guy murdered someone and is now found guilty. His excuse is that he struggled a lot in life before that, making him 'hard', and impulsive. While that helps the jury/judge/people understand him better, it shouldn't mean that he no longer gets punished for the murder.

-------------
My last point is addressing 1,2 and 6 which I agree with you on. But the question itself leaves a bit of room for clarity. The assumption that we're making is that they're judging us by their intergalactic laws, and determining if we can stay. But what if the issue is actually a self-preservation one: Upon making contact, they see all the atrocities we as a group committed, and are now debating if they should eliminate us before we advance from their technology and do the same to them. That would be dystopian and hypocritical, but I could absolutely see some human's making that decision if they felt legitimately threatened by another group.

I largely agree.
But when creating the -10 to 10 scale the extremes could still be set by what mankind is capable of envisioning, whether it has happened yet or not. How practical this is would certainly come into play however, I feel.

 

[jobo]

+

I agree that the question presumes/implies 1, 2 (Possibly) and 6. Not so much on 3/4/5. Admittedly 1,2 and 6 are enough to argue with the question, but going to address the others.

I'll look at modern society for those. Let's take a guy who is on trial for murdering someone (and he did commit the crime).

3) Does it matter how good of a guy he was outside of that? Even if he saved 5 lives in unrelated incidents, does that mean he gets to go free for the murder he committed, since objectively he did more net-good than bad in that aspect? Modern society says no.

4) So he admits to the murder, but shows how he's bettering himself. When it comes to minor crimes/misdemeanors that can work-showing how you're in therapy after hitting someone while going into a rage, or that X crime was a result of your addiction and now your in rehab, often as long as you continue with treatment and being monitored by probation, you can get out of it with no/minimal jail time (with a violation possibly resulting in going to jail). For a felony like murder this probably isn't going to happen in modern times, no matter how much you're improving.

5) So there's two ways to take this argument. A) The philosophical way that to have one thing it's opposite has to exist, and B) That struggle is the cause of bad things. I think you mean the first, but I'll address both.
A) This argument has flaws on it's own, and I'm probably going to do a bad job typing them out. Basically the argument goes that if murder is X bad, then saving someone from murder is X good (or more generally death is X bad and saving someone is X good). But you can't save someone without the bad thing existing in the first place.

There's a couple issues with this, but the main one is that it presumes that good and bad both have to be human caused/intentional. Looking at the above example, saving a life is pretty good in general. And murder is pretty bad in general. But an avalanche causing death is also bad. If there's an avalanche, I recognize it and save someone, that's still good, but man didn't need to commit bad. If someone's car goes over a cliff and into water because the mechanic messed up the breaks, and someone else jumped in and saved the person, the one guy did a lot of good, but I would argue (and this part is debatable) that the mechanic did less bad due to intent factoring in.

Keep in mind the above are specific/extreme examples, but that's not to say they're the only examples. I just used specificity to make the point. There's also a point that good and bad are relative, so even if both have to exist conceptually, we can shift the meanings of the terms. So if badness/goodness is on a scale of -10 to 10, I would put mass genocide as the -10. But if that never existed, -10 would still be there, but that would now be something like a serial killer, which on the first scale might be around a -8. So by doing more of what we consider good, and less of what we consider bad, we can effectively move the scale of bad vs. good.

B) To go back to the initial court case. The guy murdered someone and is now found guilty. His excuse is that he struggled a lot in life before that, making him 'hard', and impulsive. While that helps the jury/judge/people understand him better, it shouldn't mean that he no longer gets punished for the murder.

-------------
My last point is addressing 1,2 and 6 which I agree with you on. But the question itself leaves a bit of room for clarity. The assumption that we're making is that they're judging us by their intergalactic laws, and determining if we can stay. But what if the issue is actually a self-preservation one: Upon making contact, they see all the atrocities we as a group committed, and are now debating if they should eliminate us before we advance from their technology and do the same to them. That would be dystopian and hypocritical, but I could absolutely see some human's making that decision if they felt legitimately threatened by another group.

hmm, the only differqnce between murder and war is one is sanctioned by the state and one isnt, , the only differance between terrorists and freedom fighters, is whoes side are your country on,,,thats " murder" is a legal rather than moral thing,

the law really should follow human morals, but there a strong case that morals follow the law in a lot of situations ,even that the law will punish you if your morals differ greatly( by that you place life higher that the law does) from the legal requirement.

id give some salient examples of where human life is not at all sacred, but that ok the laws say its alright, but, it would i suspect be judged as to political

so are these aliens judging us on our laws or our morals and whoes moral exactly,

 

[JowGaWolf]

If humanity was put on trial by an advanced race of aliens, would you be able to defend humanity and argue for its continued existence?

Or would you be unable to defend humanity's actions and just plead guilty as charged?

Simple. I wouldn't defend the humans. No need to. If a race can wipe out a civilization a will then it really doesn't matter what you say. I would simply say. "If you have the power to erase humanity, then I guess the question to be answered is: "Are you the type of being who tries to help others become better, or the type who makes no effort to help others be better versions of themselves?" "Does me asking you this question help you become a better version of who you are."

I would let them know that this is my perspective of how I make friends and extended families. If a person cares about me being a better version of myself, then I consider that person my friend. If I care about helping someone be a better version of themselves then I am their friend/ family

Instead trying to save humans, I would focus on trying to learn what I could about them, the things they have seen and experienced. To be honest I would be more interested about their experiences and what things really are vs how we think they are. Is it selfish? yep. big time. But considering beings from space with the power to end "all of us regardless of what say" I figure I grab some knowledge, pictures, and a better understanding of a bigger pictures.

That way if humans get to live then I can at least share some of that knowledge and enlighten others who would find value in what I've learn.

 

[JowGaWolf]

The only thing I would ask is for the Aliens not to talk to Jobo.

 

[jobo]

The only thing I would ask is for the Aliens not to talk to Jobo.

id gas light them and send them on their way dejected and defeated, its what i do

 

[dvcochran]

id gas light them and send them on their way dejected and defeated, its what i do

What is a gas light?

 

[jobo]

What is a gas light?

it what steve accused me of doibg to him, i had to look it up

its to challenge the beliefs system that people base their reality on

 

[JowGaWolf]

id gas light them and send them on their way dejected and defeated, its what i do

You statement is why they can't talk to you. lol You'll get people shot lol

 

[jobo]

You statement is why they can't talk to you. lol You'll get people shot lol

if they are only shooting people we will do fine, if they are going to shoot you anyway, you may as well annoy them first

 

[Chrisinmd]

Haha you certainly come up with some great imaginative threads @Chrisinmd [emoji14]

Got to keep the discussions on this site imaginative and in all different areas. Cant let everyone think we are all stupid martial artist who fight but cant think! lol

I have a list of 2500 great conversation starters that I come up with my thread ideas from. Im on number 109!

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

Got to keep the discussions on this site imaginative and in all different areas. Cant let everyone think we are all stupid martial artist who fight but cant think! lol

I have a list of 2500 great conversation starters that I come up with my thread ideas from. Im on number 109!

Do they go down in quality as you get to the end? What's the last one?

 

[dvcochran]

it what steve accused me of doibg to him, i had to look it up

its to challenge the beliefs system that people base their reality on

Political groups have been doing that for years.
It truly blows my mind how some people will conform to another persons thinking simply because they are the loudest or most obnoxious person in the room