Pretty much the title. I’ve been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality.
I think it’s easy for us normies to respect other people and their property because there are clear consequences for violating social norms. But what would the average person do if they had super powers?
My morals wouldn’t change at all, my behavior would change since I don’t need to worry about consequences of fixing systemic injustice by doing “sick crimes”
Dude. they ain’t morals if the only thing stopping me is consequence
So you’re a consequentialist, then. That’s just one short step to utilitarianism, which is a pretty solid moral foundation.
Ehhhh, Consequentialism judges the morality of an action by its consequence. I’m simply not stealing shit because the inconvenience of hassle.
I think OP is guided by virtue ethics actually.
This only applies if your morals are based on nothing more than consequences, which I would argue is no moral code at all.
RIP religion
Power does not corrupt. It reveals. If you have the power to do whatever you want, it becomes apparent what you wanted to do. If having this power makes you do evil deeds, it means you already wanted to do evil deeds but lacked the power to.
For anyone who wants to learn more you should read The Power Broker by Robert Caro
That’s it! I knew I learned of this from something but forgot the name of it.
Lindsay Ellis’s Game of Thrones video?
Sounds a lot like Kant with his morality of principals to me.
People don’t need super powers for that, it’s so easy. Crack open the way for the ego drug and they do anything. Nobody is immune. The “holier” the person, the easier it is.
Consequences aren’t the only thing that cause people to act they way they act. It’s certainly one reason some people don’t do certain things.
One reason Homelander is the way he is is because how he was raised. If tomorrow I got all Homelander’s powers, I wouldn’t instantly become a psychopath. I mean it might occur to me that any action I might take, and no one could stop me or punish me. But as Homelander observed (at least in the prior season, I’m not entirely caught up) that alienation from his fellow supers is actually a consequence he deals with.
A good example of this is asking yourself if you would kill your immediate family if you could do so with impunity. For most of us the answer is, of course, no. That’s because of familiarity, and how we think of them as our “in group.” Same goes for anyone else. If you’re morally developed then no one should be afraid of you, except maybe the truly vile.
It’s weird how a person will believe they have all license to choose to be terrible version of themselves and think everyone else is just holding back. Rapists think this of all humanity. That underneath it all everyone would just be raping each other if they could get away with it. It never occurs to them these thoughts might not even occur to a person or that if it does it doesn’t really appeal. Or that people have other things they find fulfilling that just doesn’t involve hurting other people and just aren’t fixated on shit like this.
Maybe talk to a professional about NPD.
your morals would go out the window.
Why would they? I don’t enjoy hurting people, and I wouldn’t start enjoying it if I could magically get away with it.
The counterargument for this line of thinking is that it’s just theoretical. You don’t have actual experience with the scenario, so you can’t truly know how you’d behave.
We all like to think we’re paragons of virtue. But when the chips are down, most people behave in ways they never expected to.
In the words of an eminent poet, “Everybody got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
If I can’t truly know how I’d behave, then this discussion is pointless.
I claim that you don’t know how you’d truly behave, and that people are generally decent and wouldn’t harm others if there were no consequences
Sure, I don’t know how I’d react. I know for sure I’d do dodgy, illegal things. I also know that legal and moral are not synonyms. And I also know that the only person I have no choice but to live with is myself, and I have no intention of doing anything that makes me hate myself. Stopping time doesn’t change that.
Prove it. Give me the power.
I would die of old age immediately
You have the power to stop time.
🐵🐾 It stops for you, too.Soooo who starts it again? Guess that’s a lesson you only learn once lol
Since time is motion, the atmosphere would freeze solid around you, suffocating you instantly.
Usually how it works is time for you is active, but what is you? Usually thar includes clothes and stuff, and other matter inside of us that isn’t usually considered a part of us. If we extend this logic, it’d include the air in us and maybe toughing us. I think this would be more fun, because it’d leave a vacuum behind us and superheat any air we move, because it’s instantly moving without any time passing. Basically when time unfreezes there’s be a massive sonic boom on out path with superheated air all around.
Aha! But you won’t be affected until time restarts. And since time has stopped for presumably the whole universe, nothing can happen to restart it.
I’d mabye steal things i dunno
If I had the power to stop time, my morals would suddenly become enforced.
day one: pantsed every pro-life god botherer outside of every planned parenthood, all at the same moment.
day two: watched the internet take in day one. picked charities to give stacks of drug money and swiss nazi money to.
day three: etc
Not really, because you wouldn’t be able to see anything or hear anything if time stops. Even light particles would stop moving, and your eyes would just see flashes of light as you move through space.
I mean we could just assume it to be like what 1/100 seconds per seconds perceived by user and everybody else would be moving and perceiving so slowly that it accomplishes pretty much the same thing right? Bullets might be a bit tough to dodge now at ~12ft/s (for handguns) but not impossible so still seems pretty useful
At 1/100 speed, light would be so redshifted that you wouldn’t be able to perceive it. However, some X-rays (1-10nm) would be redshifted into the visible range (400 to 700nm).
I guess this means you would have x-ray vision. But you would see little to nothing since our environment normally does not include significant levels of X-rays.
True, but you know what would really make them go out the window? If I were invisible.
