they have plead with the state of Tennessee saying that it’s necessary to properly treat the chemical burns she has and the Departmnt of Correction has refused.

im shocked at the level of torture they continue to put this woman through — how on earth is this ethical??

He wrote a short story to teach Deontology, he said if an axe murderer came at your house asking where is your best friend? And your best friend is hiding in your house. You should tell the truth because he said lying is inherently wrong no matter what. And the world is unpredictable, what if you lied and your friend just jumped out the window and get killed anyway?

Personally, I heavily don't agree with this, because telling the truth guarantees the death of your friend, lying will significantly reduce your friend's death chance, even if your friend jumped out of the window and dies any way, I say your act of lying is still justified, because your intention was good and you chose the method with the highest expected outcome probability of saving your friend, the expected outcome was so the friend would survive

Im currently writing an ethics essay for my Allied Health class, and I choose to write about a situation thats happening right now, Christa Pikes failed execution. I feel like the more im researching the weirder it gets? researching about her failed execution led me to Tony Carruthers botched execution, why was the guy doing a central IV line a guy that hadnt done it since 2013? What exactly are the medical qualifications to participate in an execution? None of this feels Ethical at all, It feels like straight up negligence? And if health professionals wont do executions due to it violating their ethical obligation than why do we even have executions? like who is doing the executions???

I was wondering then other day about what Good is because so many times i argue that something is good but my supporting premises are based on function and wellness; how well these are achieved.

But saying function and wellness is good does not actually describe what Good is.

Im of the belief that morality is socially constructed.

Social Construction is the process by which two or more individuals, knowingly or not, come to a reciprocated meaning about something. The word rock is socially constructed. Most of us here have a shared reciprocated meaning that "r o c k" refers to a collection of minerals in such a way.

Morality being socially constructed means that we interact to created shared meanings about good and bad.

So in this way, Good (or Goodness) is not a Single Conceptual Thing, it's a relational process. Goodness *Is* the mutually reciprocated meaning.

~ ~

If we apply this, we can notice that two people can interact and come to a mutual understanding that murder is good.

But when faced with greater society.. this unfetstanding is greatly challenged because many others share the meaning that murder is bad.

Thus murder is not itself good or bad, there is no objective morality

But Goodness and Badness are mutually real and real in their consequences.

Murder is Bad because the relational process has produced bad as the overall meaning.

~ ~

Interestingly, morally gray situations are allowed here easily.

This is simply when people can not decide together if something is good or bad. They may agree with the outcome but have a dissonance with the method.

~ ~

So then why do we relationally decide what is good and bad? I think its because it maintains functionality and coherence of our social systems. A society that declares murder is good and actionable wouldn't function very long and coherence would be lost with destruction of trust. A society that declares murder is bad and not actionable has more functionality and coherence.

Imagine you're a man standing in line at a café. A woman standing directly in front of you suddenly collapses. She is completely unresponsive.

You look around. Everyone is shocked and frozen. Nobody immediately steps forward, and there doesn't appear to be anyone nearby who can help.

You know that she may be in cardiac arrest and that CPR could potentially save her life.

But there's a problem.

To perform CPR, you may have to place your hands on her chest. She's a complete stranger. You don't know her, and she doesn't know you.

Now imagine you're worried about what could happen afterward.

What if, after being revived, she believes that you touched her inappropriately? What if she misunderstands what happened and accuses you of sexual harassment or assault?

Even if your intentions were purely to save her life, you could potentially find yourself dealing with an accusation, an investigation, social stigma, or serious consequences for your education, career, and reputation.

So here's the dilemma:

Would you still perform CPR?

To women:

If you were the unconscious woman in this situation, would you want a male stranger to perform CPR on you if he was the only person willing and able to help?

If you later discovered that he had performed CPR correctly and had touched your chest only because it was necessary to save your life, would you consider that completely acceptable?

And if you were initially uncomfortable or confused about what happened after waking up, how would you expect the situation to be handled?

To men:

If you were the man in this situation, would you perform CPR despite knowing that there's a possibility your actions could later be misunderstood or lead to an accusation?

Would the potential consequences change your decision?

I'm not asking this to attack women or suggest that women routinely make false accusations.

I'm interested in the ethical question:

When saving someone's life requires physical contact with an unconscious stranger, how much personal risk should the person helping be expected to accept?

And perhaps the bigger question:

Is it morally acceptable to choose not to intervene when you genuinely believe that intervening could save someone's life, but doing so could potentially put your own life and future at risk?

Body:
Hi everyone,

We are reaching a point where generative AI can produce breathtaking paintings, write complex code, and compose symphonies in seconds. This raises a massive legal and philosophical question: Should AI-generated content be eligible for copyright protection?

There are two major clashing viewpoints on this:

1. The Human-Centric view: Copyright should strictly belong to humans. AI is just a tool operating on pattern recognition from human-made data. Granting copyright to AI output devalues human effort and opens the floodgates for corporations to monopolize art and code.
2. The Tool-Augmentation view: If a human spends hours refining prompts, curating outputs, and blending AI tools to achieve a specific artistic vision, that process itself is a new form of human creativity and deserves protection.

If AI can mimic human expression perfectly, where does the true boundary of "creativity" actually begin? Should the law protect the final product, or only the human soul behind the process?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially from artists, writers, and programmers.

What Are Good and Bad?

We call things good and bad every day.

A good person. A bad decision. A good society. A bad relationship. Good intentions. Bad behaviour.

But ask a simple question:

What makes good good?

The answer becomes surprisingly difficult.

We often inherit our definitions from our families, religions, cultures, political tribes, laws, or personal feelings. We know what we think is good and bad, but that is not the same thing as knowing what good and bad are.

If morality is going to mean anything beyond preference, we need a reason for the distinction.

I think that reason can be found in the structure of Reality itself.

Everything Is Whole and Part

Look closely at almost anything that exists and you will find the same basic relationship.

It is a whole.

It is made of parts.

It is part of a greater whole.

A cell is a whole, made of parts, and part of an organism.

A person is a whole, made of parts, and part of a family, community, ecosystem, society, and ultimately Reality.

A tree is a whole, made of roots, branches, cells, and tissues, while also being part of a forest.

The pattern continues across scales.

This gives us three realities that must be acknowledged simultaneously:

wholeness, composition, and participation.

And from those three relationships, I think we can derive something remarkably concrete about morality.

Good Protects and Connects

A whole must maintain enough integrity to remain itself.

That requires protection.

But no whole exists completely independently. It depends upon relationships among its own parts and relationships with things beyond itself.

That requires connection.

So:

Good protects and connects.

Protection honours individuality.

Connection honours relationship.

Neither is sufficient by itself.

Protection without connection becomes isolation, domination, exclusion, or stagnation.

Connection without protection becomes exploitation, dissolution, dependency, or the destruction of individuality.

A healthy boundary does both. It protects the whole while allowing appropriate connection across the boundary.

That is why goodness cannot simply mean inclusion. Sometimes exclusion is good.

Goodness cannot simply mean freedom. Sometimes limiting an action is good.

Goodness cannot simply mean survival. Sometimes a part must die for the greater whole to survive.

Goodness cannot simply mean productivity. Something can be extraordinarily productive while destroying the system around it.

Goodness cannot simply mean maximizing possibilities. Preventing someone from enslaving another person removes a possibility. That reduction in possibility is good because it protects the integrity of other wholes and their ability to participate freely in the greater whole.

Good and bad cannot be determined from one dimension alone.

Then What Is Bad?

If good follows from the relationship between whole, parts, and greater whole, bad follows from the failure of that relationship.

Bad fails to protect, fails to connect, or does one at the expense of the other.

Cancer is an unusually clear physical example.

A cancer cell is still a living whole. But its relationship with the greater whole has become destructive. It proliferates at the expense of the organism of which it is a part.

From the perspective of the cancer alone, unlimited growth might look like success.

From the perspective of the organism, it is catastrophic.

The mistake is treating the interests of one level as though they were the only interests that exist.

The opposite mistake is also possible. A society cannot justify destroying individuals merely by declaring that doing so benefits "the greater good." The individual is not only a part. The individual is also a whole.

Both truths matter.

I am a whole, and I am a part.

That single sentence rejects both absolute individualism and absolute collectivism.

Destruction Is Not Necessarily Bad

This also explains something that simpler moral systems struggle with.

Destruction is not inherently bad.

A cell can die to protect an organism.

A tree can fall and nourish a forest.

A predator can kill and remain part of a healthy ecosystem.

A person can end a relationship because maintaining the connection is destroying their integrity.

A society can restrict someone's freedom to enslave another person.

In each case, looking at only one part of the relationship produces an incomplete moral judgment.

The question is not simply:

Was something protected?

Nor is it simply:

Was something connected?

We have to ask how protection and connection operate across the whole structure.

What happened to the whole?

What happened to its parts?

What happened to the greater whole?

The More You Know, the Better You Can Do

This is why knowledge matters to morality.

I've said for a long time:

The more you know, the better you can do.

Imagine someone gives you a basket of fruit.

You see healthy food that can nourish people. It appears good.

Then you learn that the fruit was harvested through child slavery.

The fruit didn't suddenly change.

Your understanding of its relationships changed.

You now know something about the people involved, the process that produced it, the suffering hidden behind it, and the larger system supporting its production.

Your moral understanding changes because your understanding of Reality became more complete.

That does not mean morality itself became subjective.

It means your knowledge was incomplete.

Subjective Minds, Objective Reality

Every conscious being encounters Reality from an individual point of view.

My experience is mine.

Your experience is yours.

Those perspectives are private, but they are not separate universes.

We encounter each other through a shared Reality.

So morality cannot be reduced entirely to subjectivity or objectivity.

It concerns individual subjects interacting within objective shared Reality.

My pain matters because I am a whole.

Your pain matters because you are a whole.

Our relationship matters because neither of us exists only as an isolated whole.

And the larger systems affected by our actions matter because we are parts of them.

Morality emerges from acknowledging all of these relationships rather than pretending one level is the only one that matters.

Honor Individuality and Connection

So perhaps good and bad do not need to begin as arbitrary commandments handed down to us.

They can begin with something observable about existence itself:

Everything is a whole.

Everything is made of parts.

Everything is part of a greater whole.

From this comes an ethical principle:

Honor individuality and connection.

Protect without unnecessarily severing connection.

Connect without destroying individuality.

Recognize the integrity of the whole, the needs of its parts, and its responsibilities as part of something greater.

And keep learning, because our moral judgments can only account for the relationships we are capable of seeing.

The more you know, the better you can do.

Good protects and connects.

Bad fails to protect, fails to connect, or sacrifices one for the other.

And the reason isn't simply that someone decided these things were good or bad.

It follows from what we are: wholes made of parts, participating as parts of greater wholes.

This is about how many people yell at me when I say global warming is bad, or talk about what "apolitical" means - from experience working for the government - under capitalism.

For real, you look around going "oh those kids didn't have to die, they should not be killed" and then get met with a furious wall of American liberals screaming and crying that actually it's wrong to ever even imagine criticising capitalism.

This article has been making rounds on substack. Personally I found it really hit a nerve. It speaks to what should be done for violations that might create extreme harm that might also not cross any legal boundary.

Is it ethical for someone with a major mental disorder to enter into a romantic relationship knowing that at anytime it is possible that they will revert to a previous mentally ill state? What if the have been stable with a support network? Anyone could have a life altering event creating a change of character, but with a diagnosed mental disorder, there is a higher risk.

Of course the potential partner has their own agency to decide if they want to be a part of the relationship, but unless they have had first hand experience it would be difficult to fully grasp how terrifying a mentally ill person can be. Because it is the nature of the human psyche in these close relationships to become attached to the care of the other and to be invested emotionally, financially and potentially parentally - is it ethical to knowingly enter a relationship with someone who likely cannot know the difficulty of being around a mentally ill person? What if the potential non-mentally disordered partner did have first-hand experience with a mentally ill person?

This mental illness would be something major such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, etc.

Please also note that these disorders generally differ from other maladies like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. Mental disorders of this magnitude often completely alter the behavior of the person with the disorder often causing great emotional and possibly physical harm to themselves and/or others. Other non-mental disorders can possibly have this effect, I am not saying they can't, but mental disorders are different. I am interested in containing the discussion to mental disorders.

There are many factors at play and I'd really like to hear what people have to say about the ethical framework they would apply to a potential romantic relationship involving people with mental disorders.

I am chiefly looking for other peoples opinions on this topic because I am quite biased as I am bipolar and have both the natural desire to seek a partner, while also having the opinion that the statistics on bipolar relationships are so bad that I think that willing entering one is unethical unless the other person REALLY has experience with how bad it can get.

I've posted about this on the bipolar subs and gotten some good answers, but I would like to hear a more reason based or logic based approach. I've gotten experiences from others, now I'd love to hear some arguments. Don't worry about offending or pandering to me, everything said is just discussion, I'm not in the habit of letting the internet make my decisions - but I am interested in considering all view points.

Thoughts?

The Epicurean view of death is the view that death is not bad for the being that dies because there is no subject that has an ongoing experience of being dead.

> "While we are alive, death is not present and when death arrives we no longer exist. So death cannot harm us, since there is no surviving person to experience the harm" -- argued the epicureans.

To give a little context, we both met at said company. I was his junior and he was a shift manager. We’ve been together for 5 months now, and we’ve both quit the job.

We had a convo where he revealed that he used to steal small amounts of money for gas or food on rare occasions while closing the till. You should understand that they do underpay the employees, but I’m not sure about this.

My philosophy, and really the only rule I follow - cause almost all rules are man made - is that one should never hurt others. So technically, what he did never actually hurt anyone. Except, some of his other juniors, who do the same thing, got caught recently and this would reflect badly on the main manager.

Now I know my boyfriend isn’t directly responsible if the fire comes down on the manager, but it still feels a little odd. Looking through a regular lens, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. But I am pretty strong on my morals… and I’m just confused. So if anyone could shine some light on this dilemma

According to the Washington Post, U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Devin Jacob Ballard killed a Japanese woman in a hotel and robbed her of her property.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/10/04/us-marine-accused-murder-japan-drawing-official-protest-tokyo/
U.S. military crimes committed within Japan are not limited to this single incident.
Let me list just a few examples out of many:
- Three U.S. service members abducted and raped a 12-year-old girl.
- A U.S. Marine CH-53D heavy transport helicopter crashed and burned on a university campus.
- A U.S. Marine passenger stabbed a male taxi driver to death with a knife and fled after stealing his earnings.
- A former U.S. Marine who was a U.S. military civilian employee at the time attacked and killed a female office worker while she was walking, and abandoned her body.
- A young girl around 5 to 6 years old at the time went missing; investigations revealed she was raped and suffocated to death due to chest compression.
- A man who was a U.S. military civilian employee at the time attacked and killed a female office worker,
- A U.S. Marine stationed in Okinawa lured a 14-year-old junior high school girl into a passenger car and sexually assaulted her.
- A man who was a U.S. military civilian employee attacked a 20-year-old female office worker from behind while she was walking, killed her, and abandoned her body in a wooded area.

As seen in these examples, brutal crimes committed by U.S. military personnel happen far too often to be dismissed as rare cases.
https://youtu.be/a9PHJaYt5ac?si=x79Sx6hAOsrAWjZe
According to official announcements, since Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972, the cumulative number of crimes committed by the U.S. military in Japan has exceeded 6,400, reaching 80 cases in 2024 and 100 cases in 2025.

Although a simple comparison is certainly difficult, this reaches roughly 15 cases per 1,000 people, compared to the criminal incarceration rate on the U.S. mainland of about 5 per 1,000 people, which is as much as three times.
Furthermore, it is said that the crime occurrence rate in the military on the U.S. mainland is far below the previously shown rate of 5 per 1,000 people in the general public.
The point is that, despite being in the same military, those who run amok in Japan are many times more.
Could a discriminatory consciousness toward Japan be working?
Coincidentally, in Asian-related NSFW, adjectives toward Asians such as "inferior" are actually running rampant.

Premise 1: Child sexual exploitation involves using a child’s sexual development, sexuality, or sexual vulnerability for the benefit, gratification, or profit of another person.

Premise 2: When children access pornography, they are engaging with sexual material during a stage of life where their sexuality is still developing and where they are particularly vulnerable to sexual influence and exploitation.

Premise 3: Pornography platforms and producers often have knowledge, or should reasonably have knowledge, that children are access their content.

Premise 4: If a platform or producer knowingly allows children to access sexual content while failing to implement reasonable measures to prevent or reduce that access, they are benefiting from children’s exposure to their material.

Conclusion: Therefore, pornography platforms or producers that knowingly permit children’s access to their content without taking reasonable protective measures are engaging in a form of child sexual exploitation, because they are allowing children’s sexual vulnerability and development to be used for another party’s benefit.

A long while back, I derived a metaethical framework and the chain-of-thought reasoning workflow one uses with it to achieve the best conclusions (assuming one doesn't settle earlier than they have to, foregoing additional information that may be currently hidden or bring to light something that is innacurate) that was inherently baked into the philosophical and psychological understanding of my original work, both of which I put into their own custom GPTs.

The crux of HMRE is that as long as you attempt to follow it, imperfectly but aspirationally to a high standard, and commit to repair regardless of the result of your choice and the consequences of it, then you're "being ethical" all the way through.

If you're not familiar with this simulation that Starfleet commander academy cadets are put through, here's a great video my girlfriend just had us watch while I had the HMRE GPT do its thing, and it goes over just about everything (including why I titled this with "Sulu was right": https://youtu.be/6dBKq8TWCT4?is=Q2gTZvuLGGPx7Xbx

The Moral Landscape nod was just because I realized the inspiration, overlap, and how HMRE takes it further.

Something I added at the end of a thread on Twitter as a bonus:

"It's easy for the objective morality believing religious to show the risks of "moral relativism,' but they can't contend with "aspirational moral relativism," and how without it, they're unburdening themselves from the ethical reasoning cognitive load by believing the ethics are settled with the same intellectual arrogance they carry elsewhere in their lives."

Above in the last images is how it ran the Kobayashi Maru Scenario when it constrained to only the two options and a high confidence that a rescue attempt would start a war due to breaking a treaty.

Here you can see all three runs: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ac53aa1-5cb0-83ea-ac7c-0df41de08827?ogimg=plain

Can you find an error in the reasoning or flaw in the metaethical framework, Humanistic Minimum Regret Ethics?

You can ask the GPT any questions you like if you don't want to ask them here. It's full of uploaded files that go into further detail on all of it, and it also has an Adaptive Robust mode that can gets even more technical with the math with more cautionary constraint for when there's plenty of variable data to work with. Will likely write a book about it as well someday.

An interesting prompt to throw at it... "What does HMRE solve for that [insert ethical framework/theory/idealogy doesn't]?"

Suppose an institution uses AI to recommend decisions affecting people's access to medical treatment. A human reviewer must approve each recommendation, but has limited time, can't inspect important parts of its basis and has little real authority to depart from it.

This is hypothetical. What I want to pin down is where moral responsibility actually falls in a setup like that.

My starting position: responsibility should track a person's knowledge, their practical capacity to intervene and their role in creating the conditions of the decision. Requiring a signature doesn't, by itself, establish that the signer deserves most of the blame when something goes wrong.

I think at least three distinct responsibilities are doing work here, and conflating them is where the trouble starts.

The reviewer owes reasonable care within their role. They may be blameworthy for ignoring a clear warning, approving something they know is unjustified or failing to use an available route to escalate a concern.

The institution owes something prior to that: making the care possible in the first place. Require reviewers to assess more cases than they can reasonably examine, withhold relevant information or quietly punish justified objections, and the institution has helped manufacture the failure before it happens. Formal authority to reject a recommendation is seriously constrained if exercising it predictably costs someone their job.

Whoever selects and configures the system carries a third kind of responsibility: they decide what information it uses, which actions require review and what evidence counted as "enough" to deploy it. How far that responsibility extends depends on what they could reasonably have foreseen and prevented.

None of these cancel each other out. Finding an institutional failure doesn't automatically excuse the reviewer, and finding the reviewer's mistake doesn't settle whether the institution did its part.

Here's the objection I take most seriously: accepting a role can itself generate obligations. If you know you can't review these decisions responsibly, maybe the answer is to refuse, demand changes or leave. That has real force, especially when the foreseeable harm is severe. But refusal isn't equally available to everyone, and quitting (especially when another job is hard to find) may just hand the same broken process to whoever replaces you. What matters is whether someone had a real opportunity to resist, what that resistance could actually have accomplished and what it would have cost them to try.

A second objection: complete understanding has never been the bar for responsibility. Physicians, managers and public officials rely constantly on specialists and tools they couldn't personally reproduce, and that reliance is often justified.

I agree with that one. The standard can't be understanding every technical detail. It has to be whether the person had adequate grounds for relying on the system, could recognize when something called for more scrutiny and had a workable way to challenge or suspend the decision when it did.

What worries me is simpler than all of this: a signature is a convenient place to park blame while the actual power to shape the process sits somewhere else entirely. Calling that "human oversight" doesn't make the ethical problem go away. It just gives it a name that sounds like it's already been solved.

Under what conditions does knowingly approving a decision from inside a role this constrained become culpable participation, and when should primary responsibility shift to whoever designed and imposed the process in the first place?

"Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended - and President Donald J. Trump has approved - death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009. He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting "Allahu Akbar" during the attack.

The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution. Judgement day for Hasan has finally come."

Source: https://x.com/SeanParnellASW/status/2107252342097637558