It's just your latest non sequitur-fixation, Fool. Like so many so-called "paradoxes", under scrutiny at least one premise doesn't hold up. You're not deranged, just not reflective enough. — 180 Proof

:ok: :up:

:point: Tit for tat

Haha! Another dreamy thread which means it allows for a bad haphazard take.

The whole human shit show is absolutely reducible to tit for tat (or reciprocity variants). Treat others the way you think you ought to be treated. Live by fire, die by fire. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Plants are innocent because of their relative weaknesses (or strengths). It stems (pun) from the fact that they are immobile and slow, thus evadible. They don't stalk (pun) you. The worst of it comes by bicycling into cactus or hogweed or ingesting their poison, or losing a prized sheep to a brambles trap. The accidents are comparable to drowning or falling off a cliff, attributable to human error.

It is other minds that have done us wrong we would take revenge against in this endless saga. Even animals, by comparison to man, are innocent/amoral.

If you feel guilty for eating plants then the source of that guilt is misplaced or fanciful. You should feel guilty for eating plants because of the human labor of the harvest and what that kind of tit for tat (or causes and effects) that might entail.

If you feel guilty for eating plants then the source of that guilt is misplaced or fanciful. — Nils Loc

It's come to my notice that the moral universe has been expanding, it seems to mirror the Big Bang cosmology ( :chin: ) ever since people began thinking about right and wrong: First, morality was only about humans, then we included animals, now, with ecological sciences in full gear, morality isn't just about self-awareness or pain, it's about life itself.

Given this is so, plants and animals (humans included) and what they do to each other acquire moral significance i.e. they can be classified as either good or bad. This the key premise, it seems, in my argument.

To that add the tit-for-tat strategy and what it means to morality and we have a situation: it's alright to eat plants because they eat us but then if that's how we're going to come at the issue, eating animals is also permissible.

In short, is the tit-for-tat strategy moral/immoral?

Your "tit-for-tat strategy" is neither moral nor immoral, just instrumental.

Your "tit-for-tat strategy" is neither moral nor immoral; it's only instrumental. — 180 Proof

Two wrongs don't make a right? :chin:

As above, so below?

As above, so below? — 180 Proof

At a solary system level, it's gravity that keeps the planets in orbit

At an atomic level, it's electrical charge that keeps the electrons in orbit.

Are the two, gravity and electrical charge, the same or different?

Action, according to Newton, has an equal and opposite reaction.

Are the two, gravity and electrical charge, the same or different? — TheMadFool

They are as different as 'spacetime curved by mass' and 'chemical interactions', the latter 10³⁶ times stronger than the former. Not the same at all.

In short, is the tit-for-tat strategy moral/immoral? — TheMadFool

Is it any more useful to get specific about the tit-for-tat in question.

Folks drink ground water laced with hexavalent chromium for years from a leeching local chemical plant and suffer all kinds of health consequences unknowingly.

Class action lawsuit forms to explicate cause and effect in a court of law and obtain monetary compensation for harm done.

A true tit-for-tat might require that we force all those guilty (responsible) to drink a certain quantity of hexavalent chromium for a time. Folks would say this is immoral. Why? Because we do not want to perpetuate harm in an endless cycle that brings down everyone and undermines the institution of law and order (society), which imposes itself between our natural response of justice (an eye for an eye). But there are probably lots of cases in which a tit-for-tat response is moral, depending on how contextually strict you are with whatever tit-for-tat means, and how innocent the reprisal is.

It reminds me of Rene Girard's crazy theory of what enabled culture to begin in the first place, by using a religious scapegoat (magic) to absorb and diffuse the apocalyptic escalation of tit-for-tat violence. It kept us stable enough to bring in a formal process of justice. Though if you look at some of those jungle hunter gatherer cultures the bad juju of tit-for-tat black magic accusation is alive and well in a terrifying way. Thus begins the chain reaction of an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye... until we're all blind. Hopefully the scapegoat or scapeplant can't retaliate...

___

We charge Yew (pun), to be guilty of murder, for poisoning the children of the community with your sweet poison seeds. For every man, woman and child poisoned by Yew so in turn a Yew should be poisoned.

Yew are sentenced to death by our poison. God bless.

perpetuate harm in an endless cycle — Nils Loc

Death Spiral

In a tit for tat strategy, once an opponent defects, the tit for tat player immediately responds by defecting on the next move. This has the unfortunate consequence of causing two retaliatory strategies to continuously defect against each other resulting in a poor outcome for both players. — Wikipedia