Cylon wrote:It sounds like you're talking at least in part about my posts in that other thread, so let me clarify some misconceptions you seem to have. First off, my main question to you was not why your conscience would be so demanding, but why you thought that everybody else's consciences must be that demanding also. Here you are at least attempting to answer that question, but my only response is that just because you can't understand how someone can have a different form of conscientiousness than you do does not in any way prove that they can't.
Cylon, you've got a good point. Strictly speaking I don't
know that other people's consciences will require them to do the same things my conscience requires me to do. But I guess I strongly doubt that other people's consciences are really so different from my conscience that it would make a difference on this matter.
Let me just say that if someone's conscience requires that person to look out for the welfare of
some group of people, then it really seems unlikely to me that that conscience will allow that someone to
limit her/his assistance to just that group of people.
Granted, we have limited resources, so sometimes we find ourselves unable to sponsor
every malnourished child in the world. But then you hear of programs that have set goals to--as an organization--do some amount of good for very large groups of people (if not for everybody), and you think, "I can get behind that."
An example comes to mind of an organization that was going to attempt to build very simple computers, powered by hand cranks, that had the capacity to access the Internet, and that organization was going to try to get one into the hands of literally every child in the world. Things I've heard about that organization since then have led me to doubt that they've accomplished that goal at least
as soon as they had intended to, but I haven't given up on them yet.
Anyhow, if we can't limit the people we're trying to help to just one group of people, how can we limit it to just the people of one generation?
Cylon wrote:I may very well be wrong in my understanding, but I fail to see how it makes me any less moral a person to recognize the possibility that the universe might not last into eternity.
It
doesn't make you "any less moral a person." The universe very well
might not "last into eternity," and there's nothing wrong with taking actions based on that possibility. But so much is unknown about our universe and the universes surrounding it, that I think it's
incredibly premature to conclude that because our universe will have an end, that humanity is destined to die with it. Prepare for the death of humanity, by all means; but prepare also for the possibility that we will find a way to escape the maelstrom (/ heat death / whatever it is) and go on living somewhere else.
