GOG now using AI generated images on their store

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative.

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous. So, Geoffrey Epstein spent his own hard earned money on sex with underage girls. I am morally indignant about that. Not you, though, that would be "performative".

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous! The morally repugnant issue is sex with underage girls, spending money on it or not is irrelevant.

Uh, yeah. Go look at what you said.

Your point was that if people were spending "their own hard earned money" on something, that meant we shouldn't be morally indignant about it. This appeared to be an admonition completely independent of the content of what those people were doing with their "hard earned money". I pointed out the absurdity of this. You have just confirmed it--yes, whether someone spends "their own hard earned money" on something is in fact irrelevant to whether we should feel moral indignation about it. So, your initial statement was ludicrous.

You're still misrepresenting what I actually said, and that's the core issue here.

My original statement:

"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."

Nowhere did I say - or even imply - that *spending one's own money makes any action morally acceptable* or immune to criticism. That would be an absurd, blanket claim, and I never made it.

What I did say is that moral outrage directed specifically at how people spend their own money (on legal, consensual, victimless things - the qualification you seem to require, despite its obviousness) often feels performative - i.e., it's frequently more about signaling virtue, enforcing conformity, or expressing envy/disapproval of lifestyle choices than about addressing actual harm.

Your Epstein example doesn't refute that at all; it just changes the subject to something completely different. The moral horror in the Epstein case is *the rape and exploitation of children* - a serious crime with direct victims. That's not "what he did with his money" in any meaningful sense; it's felony sexual abuse. The money was merely the means/tool, not the morally relevant part. Condemning child rape isn't "indignation over what others do with their hard earned money" - it's indignation over *child rape*. Conflating the two is a deliberate sleight of hand.

To make your rebuttal work, you had to rewrite my position as something like:
"No one should ever feel moral indignation about anything purchased with one's own money, no matter how evil."

But that's a *straw man*. I never universalized it that way. The scope was always about personal spending choices that don't directly victimize others (luxury goods, adult entertainment, donations to controversial causes, etc.). You stripped out that implicit qualifier, replaced it with an extreme version that includes heinous crimes, then declared the whole thing "ludicrous." That's not engaging with what I said - it's manufacturing an easier target.

My logic remains perfectly consistent:

When the action itself is harmless / consensual / victimless, moral indignation about how someone spends *their own money* on it is often performative (status-signaling, puritanism, etc.).

When the action is harmful (especially criminal and victim-involving), then outrage is justified - and the fact that money changed hands is irrelevant to the moral assessment.

The distinction isn't hard to see unless you're intentionally blurring it. Either you are misreading or you are knowingly misleading.

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative.

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous. So, Geoffrey Epstein spent his own hard earned money on sex with underage girls. I am morally indignant about that. Not you, though, that would be "performative".

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous! The morally repugnant issue is sex with underage girls, spending money on it or not is irrelevant.

Uh, yeah. Go look at what you said.

Your point was that if people were spending "their own hard earned money" on something, that meant we shouldn't be morally indignant about it. This appeared to be an admonition completely independent of the content of what those people were doing with their "hard earned money". I pointed out the absurdity of this. You have just confirmed it--yes, whether someone spends "their own hard earned money" on something is in fact irrelevant to whether we should feel moral indignation about it. So, your initial statement was ludicrous.

You're still misrepresenting what I actually said, and that's the core issue here.

My original statement:

"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."

Nowhere did I say - or even imply - that *spending one's own money makes any action morally acceptable* or immune to criticism. That would be an absurd, blanket claim, and I never made it.

Oh, please. Let's unpack a bit, shall we?

So, first, that implication is certainly there in the basic grammar. Clearly it is the fact that the things done are done by people with their own hard earned money, that makes the indignation performative. If it were not, there would be no point mentioning the money in the first place, but instead the money is the only thing mentioned that characterizes what the people are doing. No doubt the claim wasn't intended to have to handle a reductio ad absurdum, but rather the money was perhaps only intended to be sufficient to wash clean venial sins, but this was certainly on its face a claim that people shouldn't be getting on people's case if what they're doing is spending money.

But on what basis? The core of the statement is that the money is "hard earned". So this is not just any money--it is presumed to be money acquired by working hard, by adhering to the Protestant work ethic. It is virtuous money, and the possessor is virtuous through having acquired it. The current context relates to someone with enough money to own a company, so, considerable wealth. The invocation of the "hard earned" money suggests that the possessors of that much money are, by that fact, our betters. And so, anything they might decide to do with it can be assumed to be above our criticism.

It was an extremely loaded statement, and loaded quite cleverly at that, meant to get people to digest it without quite realizing what they'd swallowed.

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleMy logic remains perfectly consistent:

When the action itself is harmless / consensual / victimless, moral indignation about how someone spends *their own money* on it is often performative (status-signaling, puritanism, etc.).

When the action is harmful (especially criminal and victim-involving), then outrage is justified - and the fact that money changed hands is irrelevant to the moral assessment.

The distinction isn't hard to see unless you're intentionally blurring it. Either you are misreading or you are knowingly misleading.

Again, there is no point in bringing the money in and calling it "hard earned" unless you are trying to valorize the money (and its possessor). When an action is genuinely "harmless / consensual / victimless", one can simply say that nobody should be indignant about it because there is nothing to be indignant about.

As to whether activities involving the use of AI are that sort of activity . . . they're externalities, like a factory that emits pollution. People are being or will be hurt, but it's nobody you know and in the short term you have no real way to find out just who. Now, for factories that emit pollution, some moral censure is reasonable, and may have some impact if much of society can forge a normative consensus that generating such pollution is bad. But probably the impact will be small, since it does not remove the profitability of the externality. It's no substitute for a solid regulatory environment. But does that mean that criticism of people exploiting externalities for profit is pointless? Certainly not. It helps forge societal consensus that can lead to the enactment of appropriate regulation.