Perplexed comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong

48 Post author: MBlume 16 April 2009 09:06AM

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Comment author: Perplexed 12 June 2011 05:09:23PM *  1 point [-]

... that has nothing to do with having a soul.

Well, it has nothing to do with what you think of as a 'soul'.

Personally, I'm not that taken with the local tendency to demand that any problematic word be tabooed. But I think that it might have been worthwhile to make that demand of HopeFox when she first used the word 'soul'.

Given my own background, I immediately attached a connotation of immortality upon seeing the word. And for that reason, I was puzzled at the conflation of moral worth with possession of a soul. Because my intuition tells me I should be more respectful of something that I might seriously damage than of someone that can survive anything I might do to it.