Science Fiction

13713 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Tenthrow

The laws of sentience (self.sciencefiction)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by j4k3 to c/sciencefiction

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm constraining the laws of sentience in my own science fiction universe. I'm conceptualizing and not wording a polished version.

The principals of sentience

one must never act to harm self or other sentients
one must practice tit for tat with a tenth extra measure of forgiveness
sentients disarm and uplift all subsentients to mitigate self harm
sentience is a measure of behavior only applicable on millennial scales

These ideas lead me to question: where exactly does the Hippocratic principal of "first do no harm" fail us as humans and lead to the mass murder orgies of war?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I think because we don't use "first do no harm" as a first and higher-order law. It gets overridden by religion, vengeance, something might seem threatening or unfair more due to subjective perspective and then you're doing harm to defend something (unrightfully)...

And what's with situations where you can't avoid harm? And if you can never do harm, you also can't defend something against malicious actors?! I mean that might be alright in your scifi universe, but that's definitely not how our world works. We have malicious sentient beings around. And it's necessary to act against them.