Stravo wrote:You have to wonder about calling God evil.
No, I don't.
Say you are an entity that is so advanced, so alien in the way it perceives and does things that we are like insects to it.
This is a false premise. You note that you're much more complex/intelligent than an insect, you postulate an intelligence the same factor more complex/intelligent than yourself, then you try and say moral worth is equivalent to the complexity of the problems you can solve or the absolute amount of mind-stuff you have. If you truly bought into this premise you'd be saying that IQ 70 people should be the slaves of IQ 130 people because the later are inherently superior. It doesn't apply in this story anyway (because the demons really aren't that superior, they just have the high ground), but even for a genuine superintelligence the comparison simply doesn't work.
If you had to pick a single feature to attach moral worth to, it would be self-awareness. This is a
structural feature of an intelligent entity, not a
performance or size metric. Invertebrates don't have it at all. Non-primates only have it to a very limited degree. Humans have it to a vastly higher degree than any other animal on earth; it's a key part of our bundle of unique cognitive capabilities that let us do things utterly unprecedented in the history of the planet. Humans don't have complete self-awareness of course, and I'm certainly open to the possibility that there is a 'deeper, more intense, more meaningful mode of consciousness' (sounds trite I know - nontechnical words don't really convey this, though Iain Bank's stuff on Culture Minds comes close at times) that has more inherent moral worth than human experience. But I really don't think it goes much higher. The 'individual moral worth curve' is a sigmoid ('s-curve') when plotted against self-awareness, with long trailing regions on each side; humans are fairly near the top of moral worth scale while only being moderately high up the self-awareness scale. The key point is that we're well past the critical inflection area; chimps and dolphins for example are probably slap bang in the middle of this.
Of course no decent systematised morality is going to be based on a single variable like that, even a deep structural one, but that's the important part (questions of volition, which basically mean goal system structure, are a close second). All the most important classes of rights should be absolute, not relative - that's pretty much an axiom for constructing the system in the first place, exceptions only come in for 'would be nice' rights that require relative standards of competence to be exercised safely (and even those are effectively absolute in a society where indefinite personal growth is freely accessible to all).
The universe doesn't define any absolute morality. The closest it comes to that is what strategies can be proven to works via game theory (in reasonably generalised circumstances like the prisoner's dilemma) and what doesn't - incidentally the 'Golden Rule' (treat your inferiors as you wish to be treated by your superiors) comes out of that and the demons are already uneasy about the implications of violating it. Ultimately, after you've eliminated morality that's invalid due to fuzziness of specification or internal inconsistency, there's just moral propositions that you agree with and moral propositions that you don't. But frankly any statement that 'God isn't evil because it's ok for him to treat us like ants' is one I reject out of hand and that I would hope any sane intelligent human would too. The practical consequence of that is exactly what is happening here; the moral course of action, as I and hopefully most secular humans see it, is to invade these 'higher planes' and dethrone their tyranical rulers.
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Fortunately I was quick enough to get out of the way.
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